Modeling the interaction between proteins and ligands and accurately predicting their binding structures is a critical yet challenging task in drug discovery. Recent advancements in deep learning have shown promise in addressing this challenge, with sampling-based and regression-based methods emerging as two prominent approaches. However, these methods have notable limitations. Sampling-based methods often suffer from low efficiency due to the need for generating multiple candidate structures for selection. On the other hand, regression-based methods offer fast predictions but may experience decreased accuracy. Additionally, the variation in protein sizes often requires external modules for selecting suitable binding pockets, further impacting efficiency. In this work, we propose $\mathbf{FABind}$, an end-to-end model that combines pocket prediction and docking to achieve accurate and fast protein-ligand binding. $\mathbf{FABind}$ incorporates a unique ligand-informed pocket prediction module, which is also leveraged for docking pose estimation. The model further enhances the docking process by incrementally integrating the predicted pocket to optimize protein-ligand binding, reducing discrepancies between training and inference. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, our proposed $\mathbf{FABind}$ demonstrates strong advantages in terms of effectiveness and efficiency compared to existing methods. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/QizhiPei/FABind}{Github}$.  ( 2 min )

Maximum-type statistics of certain functions of the sample covariance matrix of high-dimensional vector time series are studied to statistically confirm or reject the null hypothesis that a data set has been collected under normal conditions. The approach generalizes the case of the maximal deviation of the sample autocovariances function from its assumed values. Within a linear time series framework it is shown that Gumbel-type extreme value asymptotics holds true. As applications we discuss long-only mimimal-variance portfolio optimization and subportfolio analysis with respect to idiosyncratic risks, ETF index tracking by sparse tracking portfolios, convolutional deep learners for image analysis and the analysis of array-of-sensors data.  ( 2 min )

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have shown promise in aiding and accelerating classical combinatorial optimization algorithms. ML-based speed ups that aim to learn in an end to end manner (i.e., directly output the solution) tend to trade off run time with solution quality. Therefore, solutions that are able to accelerate existing solvers while maintaining their performance guarantees, are of great interest. We consider an APX-hard problem, where an adversary aims to attack shortest paths in a graph by removing the minimum number of edges. We propose the GRASP algorithm: Graph Attention Accelerated Shortest Path Attack, an ML aided optimization algorithm that achieves run times up to 10x faster, while maintaining the quality of solution generated. GRASP uses a graph attention network to identify a smaller subgraph containing the combinatorial solution, thus effectively reducing the input problem size. Additionally, we demonstrate how careful representation of the input graph, including node features that correlate well with the optimization task, can highlight important structure in the optimization solution.  ( 2 min )

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have ignited interest in the temporal knowledge graph (tKG) domain, where conventional carefully designed embedding-based and rule-based models dominate. The question remains open of whether pre-trained LLMs can understand structured temporal relational data and replace them as the foundation model for temporal relational forecasting. Therefore, we bring temporal knowledge forecasting into the generative setting. However, challenges occur in the huge chasms between complex temporal graph data structure and sequential natural expressions LLMs can handle, and between the enormous data sizes of tKGs and heavy computation costs of finetuning LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel retrieval augmented generation framework that performs generative forecasting on tKGs named GenTKG, which combines a temporal logical rule-based retrieval strategy and lightweight parameter-efficient instruction tuning. Extensive experiments have shown that GenTKG outperforms conventional methods of temporal relational forecasting under low computation resources. GenTKG also highlights remarkable transferability with exceeding performance on unseen datasets without re-training. Our work reveals the huge potential of LLMs in the tKG domain and opens a new frontier for generative forecasting on tKGs.  ( 2 min )

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach for solving challenging combinatorial optimization problems without specialized algorithm design by experts. However, most constructive NCO methods cannot solve problems with large-scale instance sizes, which significantly diminishes their usefulness for real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel Light Encoder and Heavy Decoder (LEHD) model with a strong generalization ability to address this critical issue. The LEHD model can learn to dynamically capture the relationships between all available nodes of varying sizes, which is beneficial for model generalization to problems of various scales. Moreover, we develop a data-efficient training scheme and a flexible solution construction mechanism for the proposed LEHD model. By training on small-scale problem instances, the LEHD model can generate nearly optimal solutions for the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) with up to 1000 nodes, and also generalizes well to solve real-world TSPLib and CVRPLib problems. These results confirm our proposed LEHD model can significantly improve the state-of-the-art performance for constructive NCO. The code is available at https://github.com/CIAM-Group/NCO_code/tree/main/single_objective/LEHD.  ( 2 min )

Neural operators as novel neural architectures for fast approximating solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs), have shown considerable promise for future scientific computing. However, the mainstream of training neural operators is still data-driven, which needs an expensive ground-truth dataset from various sources (e.g., solving PDEs' samples with the conventional solvers, real-world experiments) in addition to training stage costs. From a computational perspective, marrying operator learning and specific domain knowledge to solve PDEs is an essential step in reducing dataset costs and label-free learning. We propose a novel paradigm that provides a unified framework of training neural operators and solving PDEs with the variational form, which we refer to as the variational operator learning (VOL). Ritz and Galerkin approach with finite element discretization are developed for VOL to achieve matrix-free approximation of system functional and residual, then direct minimization and iterative update are proposed as two optimization strategies for VOL. Various types of experiments based on reasonable benchmarks about variable heat source, Darcy flow, and variable stiffness elasticity are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of VOL. With a label-free training set and a 5-label-only shift set, VOL learns solution operators with its test errors decreasing in a power law with respect to the amount of unlabeled data. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that integrates the perspectives of the weak form and efficient iterative methods for solving sparse linear systems into the end-to-end operator learning task.  ( 3 min )

The exploration of transition state (TS) geometries is crucial for elucidating chemical reaction mechanisms and modeling their kinetics. Recently, machine learning (ML) models have shown remarkable performance for prediction of TS geometries. However, they require 3D conformations of reactants and products often with their appropriate orientations as input, which demands substantial efforts and computational cost. Here, we propose a generative approach based on the stochastic diffusion method, namely TSDiff, for prediction of TS geometries just from 2D molecular graphs. TSDiff outperformed the existing ML models with 3D geometries in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, it enables to sample various TS conformations, because it learned the distribution of TS geometries for diverse reactions in training. Thus, TSDiff was able to find more favorable reaction pathways with lower barrier heights than those in the reference database. These results demonstrate that TSDiff shows promising potential for an efficient and reliable TS exploration.  ( 2 min )

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and demonstrated impressive capabilities in various tasks. Unfortunately, they are prone to hallucinations, where the model exposes incorrect or false information in its responses, which renders diligent evaluation approaches mandatory. While LLM performance in specific knowledge fields is often evaluated based on question and answer (Q&A) datasets, such evaluations usually report only a single accuracy number for the dataset, which often covers an entire field. This field-based evaluation, is problematic with respect to transparency and model improvement. A stratified evaluation could instead reveal subfields, where hallucinations are more likely to occur and thus help to better assess LLMs' risks and guide their further development. To support such stratified evaluations, we propose LLMMaps as a novel visualization technique that enables users to evaluate LLMs' performance with respect to Q&A datasets. LLMMaps provide detailed insights into LLMs' knowledge capabilities in different subfields, by transforming Q&A datasets as well as LLM responses into an internal knowledge structure. An extension for comparative visualization furthermore, allows for the detailed comparison of multiple LLMs. To assess LLMMaps we use them to conduct a comparative analysis of several state-of-the-art LLMs, such as BLOOM, GPT-2, GPT-3, ChatGPT and LLaMa-13B, as well as two qualitative user evaluations. All necessary source code and data for generating LLMMaps to be used in scientific publications and elsewhere is available on GitHub: https://github.com/viscom-ulm/LLMMaps  ( 3 min )

This paper introduces a novel model-agnostic algorithm called adaptive ensemble batch multi-input multi-output conformalized quantile regression (AEnbMIMOCQR} that enables forecasters to generate multi-step ahead prediction intervals for a fixed pre-specified miscoverage rate in a distribution-free manner. Our method is grounded on conformal prediction principles, however, it does not require data splitting and provides close to exact coverage even when the data is not exchangeable. Moreover, the resulting prediction intervals, besides being empirically valid along the forecast horizon, do not neglect heteroscedasticity. AEnbMIMOCQR is designed to be robust to distribution shifts, which means that its prediction intervals remain reliable over an unlimited period of time, without entailing retraining or imposing unrealistic strict assumptions on the data-generating process. Through methodically experimentation, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms other competitive methods on both real-world and synthetic datasets. The code used in the experimental part and a tutorial on how to use AEnbMIMOCQR can be found at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/Quilograma/AEnbMIMOCQR.  ( 3 min )

Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments can produce training data with spurious correlations between features due to the amount of training data or its limited feature coverage. This can lead to RL agents encoding these misleading correlations in their latent representation, preventing the agent from generalising if the correlation changes within the environment or when deployed in the real world. Disentangled representations can improve robustness, but existing disentanglement techniques that minimise mutual information between features require independent features, thus they cannot disentangle correlated features. We propose an auxiliary task for RL algorithms that learns a disentangled representation of high-dimensional observations with correlated features by minimising the conditional mutual information between features in the representation. We demonstrate experimentally, using continuous control tasks, that our approach improves generalisation under correlation shifts, as well as improving the training performance of RL algorithms in the presence of correlated features.  ( 2 min )

This paper focuses on enhancing Bengali Document Layout Analysis (DLA) using the YOLOv8 model and innovative post-processing techniques. We tackle challenges unique to the complex Bengali script by employing data augmentation for model robustness. After meticulous validation set evaluation, we fine-tune our approach on the complete dataset, leading to a two-stage prediction strategy for accurate element segmentation. Our ensemble model, combined with post-processing, outperforms individual base architectures, addressing issues identified in the BaDLAD dataset. By leveraging this approach, we aim to advance Bengali document analysis, contributing to improved OCR and document comprehension and BaDLAD serves as a foundational resource for this endeavor, aiding future research in the field. Furthermore, our experiments provided key insights to incorporate new strategies into the established solution.

Graph Neural Networks are a natural fit for learning algorithms. They can directly represent tasks through an abstract but versatile graph structure and handle inputs of different sizes. This opens up the possibility for scaling and extrapolation to larger graphs, one of the most important advantages of an algorithm. However, this raises two core questions i) How can we enable nodes to gather the required information in a given graph ($\textit{information exchange}$), even if is far away and ii) How can we design an execution framework which enables this information exchange for extrapolation to larger graph sizes ($\textit{algorithmic alignment for extrapolation}$). We propose a new execution framework that is inspired by the design principles of distributed algorithms: Flood and Echo Net. It propagates messages through the entire graph in a wave like activation pattern, which naturally generalizes to larger instances. Through its sparse but parallel activations it is provably more efficient in terms of message complexity. We study the proposed model and provide both empirical evidence and theoretical insights in terms of its expressiveness, efficiency, information exchange and ability to extrapolate.

Innovative foundation models, such as GPT-3 and stable diffusion models, have made a paradigm shift in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) towards generative AI-based systems. In unison, from data communication and networking perspective, AI and machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms are envisioned to be pervasively incorporated into the future generations of wireless communications systems, highlighting the need for novel AI-native solutions for the emergent communication scenarios. In this article, we outline the applications of generative AI in wireless communication systems to lay the foundations for research in this field. Diffusion-based generative models, as the new state-of-the-art paradigm of generative models, are introduced, and their applications in wireless communication systems are discussed. Two case studies are also presented to showcase how diffusion models can be exploited for the development of resilient AI-native communication systems. Specifically, we propose denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) for a wireless communication scheme with non-ideal transceivers, where 30% improvement is achieved in terms of bit error rate. As the second application, DDPMs are employed at the transmitter to shape the constellation symbols, highlighting a robust out-of-distribution performance. Finally, future directions and open issues for the development of generative AI-based wireless systems are discussed to promote future research endeavors towards wireless generative AI (WiGenAI).

In this paper, we propose a fuzzy adaptive loss function for enhancing deep learning performance in classification tasks. Specifically, we redefine the cross-entropy loss to effectively address class-level noise conditions, including the challenging problem of class imbalance. Our approach introduces aggregation operators, leveraging the power of fuzzy logic to improve classification accuracy. The rationale behind our proposed method lies in the iterative up-weighting of class-level components within the loss function, focusing on those with larger errors. To achieve this, we employ the ordered weighted average (OWA) operator and combine it with an adaptive scheme for gradient-based learning. Through extensive experimentation, our method outperforms other commonly used loss functions, such as the standard cross-entropy or focal loss, across various binary and multiclass classification tasks. Furthermore, we explore the influence of hyperparameters associated with the OWA operators and present a default configuration that performs well across different experimental settings.  ( 2 min )

Most packages for the analysis of fMRI-based functional connectivity (FC) and genomic data are used with a programming language interface, lacking an easy-to-navigate GUI frontend. This exacerbates two problems found in these types of data: demographic confounds and quality control in the face of high dimensionality of features. The reason is that it is too slow and cumbersome to use a programming interface to create all the necessary visualizations required to identify all correlations, confounding effects, or quality control problems in a dataset. To remedy this situation, we have developed ImageNomer, a data visualization and analysis tool that allows inspection of both subject-level and cohort-level demographic, genomic, and imaging features. The software is Python-based, runs in a self-contained Docker image, and contains a browser-based GUI frontend. We demonstrate the usefulness of ImageNomer by identifying an unexpected race confound when predicting achievement scores in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) dataset. In the past, many studies have attempted to use FC to identify achievement-related features in fMRI. Using ImageNomer, we find a clear potential for confounding effects of race. Using correlation analysis in the ImageNomer software, we show that FCs correlated with Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) score are in fact more highly correlated with race. Investigating further, we find that whereas both FC and SNP (genomic) features can account for 10-15\% of WRAT score variation, this predictive ability disappears when controlling for race. In this work, we demonstrate the advantage of our ImageNomer GUI tool in data exploration and confound detection. Additionally, this work identifies race as a strong confound in FC data and casts doubt on the possibility of finding unbiased achievement-related features in fMRI and SNP data of healthy adolescents.

In the upcoming decade, deep learning may revolutionize the natural sciences, enhancing our capacity to model and predict natural occurrences. This could herald a new era of scientific exploration, bringing significant advancements across sectors from drug development to renewable energy. To answer this call, we present DeepSpeed4Science initiative (deepspeed4science.ai) which aims to build unique capabilities through AI system technology innovations to help domain experts to unlock today's biggest science mysteries. By leveraging DeepSpeed's current technology pillars (training, inference and compression) as base technology enablers, DeepSpeed4Science will create a new set of AI system technologies tailored for accelerating scientific discoveries by addressing their unique complexity beyond the common technical approaches used for accelerating generic large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we showcase the early progress we made with DeepSpeed4Science in addressing two of the critical system challenges in structural biology research.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extremely successful in generating samples, from seemingly high dimensional probability measures. However, these methods struggle to capture the temporal dependence of joint probability distributions induced by time-series data. Furthermore, long time-series data streams hugely increase the dimension of the target space, which may render generative modelling infeasible. To overcome these challenges, motivated by the autoregressive models in econometric, we are interested in the conditional distribution of future time series given the past information. We propose the generic conditional Sig-WGAN framework by integrating Wasserstein-GANs (WGANs) with mathematically principled and efficient path feature extraction called the signature of a path. The signature of a path is a graded sequence of statistics that provides a universal description for a stream of data, and its expected value characterises the law of the time-series model. In particular, we develop the conditional Sig-$W_1$ metric, that captures the conditional joint law of time series models, and use it as a discriminator. The signature feature space enables the explicit representation of the proposed discriminators which alleviates the need for expensive training. We validate our method on both synthetic and empirical dataset and observe that our method consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks with respect to measures of similarity and predictive ability.  ( 3 min )

In data-driven optimization, sample average approximation (SAA) is known to suffer from the so-called optimizer's curse that causes an over-optimistic evaluation of the solution performance. We argue that a special type of distributionallly robust optimization (DRO) formulation offers theoretical advantages in correcting for this optimizer's curse compared to simple ``margin'' adjustments to SAA and other DRO approaches: It attains a statistical bound on the out-of-sample performance, for a wide class of objective functions and distributions, that is nearly tightest in terms of exponential decay rate. This DRO uses an ambiguity set based on a Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence smoothed by the Wasserstein or L\'evy-Prokhorov (LP) distance via a suitable distance optimization. Computationally, we also show that such a DRO, and its generalized versions using smoothed $f$-divergence, are not harder than DRO problems based on $f$-divergence or Wasserstein distances, rendering our DRO formulations both statistically optimal and computationally viable.  ( 2 min )

What is the relationship between model architecture and the ability to perform in-context learning? In this empirical study, we take the first steps towards answering this question. In particular, we evaluate fifteen model architectures across a suite of synthetic in-context learning tasks. The selected architectures represent a broad range of paradigms, including recurrent and convolution-based neural networks, transformers, and emerging attention alternatives. We discover that all considered architectures can perform in-context learning under certain conditions. However, contemporary architectures are found to be the best performing, especially as task complexity grows. Additionally, our follow-up experiments delve into various factors that influence in-context learning. We observe varied sensitivities among architectures with respect to hyperparameter settings. Our study of training dynamics reveals that certain architectures exhibit a smooth, progressive learning trajectory, while others demonstrate periods of stagnation followed by abrupt mastery of the task. Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, we find that several emerging attention alternatives are more robust in-context learners than transformers; since such approaches have constant-sized memory footprints at inference time, this result opens the future possibility of scaling up in-context learning to vastly larger numbers of in-context examples.

This paper introduces BarlowRL, a data-efficient reinforcement learning agent that combines the Barlow Twins self-supervised learning framework with DER (Data-Efficient Rainbow) algorithm. BarlowRL outperforms both DER and its contrastive counterpart CURL on the Atari 100k benchmark. BarlowRL avoids dimensional collapse by enforcing information spread to the whole space. This helps RL algorithms to utilize uniformly spread state representation that eventually results in a remarkable performance. The integration of Barlow Twins with DER enhances data efficiency and achieves superior performance in the RL tasks. BarlowRL demonstrates the potential of incorporating self-supervised learning techniques to improve RL algorithms.

We propose a generalization of the synthetic controls and synthetic interventions methodology to incorporate network interference. We consider the estimation of unit-specific potential outcomes from panel data in the presence of spillover across units and unobserved confounding. Key to our approach is a novel latent factor model that takes into account network interference and generalizes the factor models typically used in panel data settings. We propose an estimator, Network Synthetic Interventions (NSI), and show that it consistently estimates the mean outcomes for a unit under an arbitrary set of counterfactual treatments for the network. We further establish that the estimator is asymptotically normal. We furnish two validity tests for whether the NSI estimator reliably generalizes to produce accurate counterfactual estimates. We provide a novel graph-based experiment design that guarantees the NSI estimator produces accurate counterfactual estimates, and also analyze the sample complexity of the proposed design. We conclude with simulations that corroborate our theoretical findings.

Neural-symbolic computing (NeSy), which pursues the integration of the symbolic and statistical paradigms of cognition, has been an active research area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for many years. As NeSy shows promise of reconciling the advantages of reasoning and interpretability of symbolic representation and robust learning in neural networks, it may serve as a catalyst for the next generation of AI. In the present paper, we provide a systematic overview of the recent developments and important contributions of NeSy research. Firstly, we introduce study history of this area, covering early work and foundations. We further discuss background concepts and identify key driving factors behind the development of NeSy. Afterward, we categorize recent landmark approaches along several main characteristics that underline this research paradigm, including neural-symbolic integration, knowledge representation, knowledge embedding, and functionality. Next, we briefly discuss the successful application of modern NeSy approaches in several domains. Then, we benchmark several NeSy methods on three representative application tasks. Finally, we identify the open problems together with potential future research directions. This survey is expected to help new researchers enter this rapidly evolving field and accelerate the progress towards data-and knowledge-driven AI.  ( 2 min )

We study the problem of future step anticipation in procedural videos. Given a video of an ongoing procedural activity, we predict a plausible next procedure step described in rich natural language. While most previous work focus on the problem of data scarcity in procedural video datasets, another core challenge of future anticipation is how to account for multiple plausible future realizations in natural settings. This problem has been largely overlooked in previous work. To address this challenge, we frame future step prediction as modelling the distribution of all possible candidates for the next step. Specifically, we design a generative model that takes a series of video clips as input, and generates multiple plausible and diverse candidates (in natural language) for the next step. Following previous work, we side-step the video annotation scarcity by pretraining our model on a large text-based corpus of procedural activities, and then transfer the model to the video domain. Our experiments, both in textual and video domains, show that our model captures diversity in the next step prediction and generates multiple plausible future predictions. Moreover, our model establishes new state-of-the-art results on YouCookII, where it outperforms existing baselines on the next step anticipation. Finally, we also show that our model can successfully transfer from text to the video domain zero-shot, ie, without fine-tuning or adaptation, and produces good-quality future step predictions from video.

Graph-structured data is ubiquitous in the world which models complex relationships between objects, enabling various Web applications. Daily influxes of unlabeled graph data on the Web offer immense potential for these applications. Graph self-supervised algorithms have achieved significant success in acquiring generic knowledge from abundant unlabeled graph data. These pre-trained models can be applied to various downstream Web applications, saving training time and improving downstream (target) performance. However, different graphs, even across seemingly similar domains, can differ significantly in terms of attribute semantics, posing difficulties, if not infeasibility, for transferring the pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Concretely speaking, for example, the additional task-specific node information in downstream tasks (specificity) is usually deliberately omitted so that the pre-trained representation (transferability) can be leveraged. The trade-off as such is termed as "transferability-specificity dilemma" in this work. To address this challenge, we introduce an innovative deployment module coined as GraphControl, motivated by ControlNet, to realize better graph domain transfer learning. Specifically, by leveraging universal structural pre-trained models and GraphControl, we align the input space across various graphs and incorporate unique characteristics of target data as conditional inputs. These conditions will be progressively integrated into the model during fine-tuning or prompt tuning through ControlNet, facilitating personalized deployment. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly enhances the adaptability of pre-trained models on target attributed datasets, achieving 1.4-3x performance gain. Furthermore, it outperforms training-from-scratch methods on target data with a comparable margin and exhibits faster convergence.

Large vision-language models have achieved outstanding performance, but their size and computational requirements make their deployment on resource-constrained devices and time-sensitive tasks impractical. Model distillation, the process of creating smaller, faster models that maintain the performance of larger models, is a promising direction towards the solution. This paper investigates the distillation of visual representations in large teacher vision-language models into lightweight student models using a small- or mid-scale dataset. Notably, this study focuses on open-vocabulary out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, a challenging problem that has been overlooked in previous model distillation literature. We propose two principles from vision and language modality perspectives to enhance student's OOD generalization: (1) by better imitating teacher's visual representation space, and carefully promoting better coherence in vision-language alignment with the teacher; (2) by enriching the teacher's language representations with informative and finegrained semantic attributes to effectively distinguish between different labels. We propose several metrics and conduct extensive experiments to investigate their techniques. The results demonstrate significant improvements in zero-shot and few-shot student performance on open-vocabulary out-of-distribution classification, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed approaches. Poster: https://xuanlinli17.github.io/pdfs/iccv23_large_vlm_distillation_poster.pdf Code: https://github.com/xuanlinli17/large_vlm_distillation_ood  ( 2 min )

Humans often acquire new skills through observation and imitation. For robotic agents, learning from the plethora of unlabeled video demonstration data available on the Internet necessitates imitating the expert without access to its action, presenting a challenge known as Imitation Learning from Observations (ILfO). A common approach to tackle ILfO problems is to convert them into inverse reinforcement learning problems, utilizing a proxy reward computed from the agent's and the expert's observations. Nonetheless, we identify that tasks characterized by a progress dependency property pose significant challenges for such approaches; in these tasks, the agent needs to initially learn the expert's preceding behaviors before mastering the subsequent ones. Our investigation reveals that the main cause is that the reward signals assigned to later steps hinder the learning of initial behaviors. To address this challenge, we present a novel ILfO framework that enables the agent to master earlier behaviors before advancing to later ones. We introduce an Automatic Discount Scheduling (ADS) mechanism that adaptively alters the discount factor in reinforcement learning during the training phase, prioritizing earlier rewards initially and gradually engaging later rewards only when the earlier behaviors have been mastered. Our experiments, conducted on nine Meta-World tasks, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all tasks, including those that are unsolvable by them.

Speech conveys more information than text, as the same word can be uttered in various voices to convey diverse information. Compared to traditional text-to-speech (TTS) methods relying on speech prompts (reference speech) for voice variability, using text prompts (descriptions) is more user-friendly since speech prompts can be hard to find or may not exist at all. TTS approaches based on the text prompt face two main challenges: 1) the one-to-many problem, where not all details about voice variability can be described in the text prompt, and 2) the limited availability of text prompt datasets, where vendors and large cost of data labeling are required to write text prompts for speech. In this work, we introduce PromptTTS 2 to address these challenges with a variation network to provide variability information of voice not captured by text prompts, and a prompt generation pipeline to utilize the large language models (LLM) to compose high quality text prompts. Specifically, the variation network predicts the representation extracted from the reference speech (which contains full information about voice variability) based on the text prompt representation. For the prompt generation pipeline, it generates text prompts for speech with a speech language understanding model to recognize voice attributes (e.g., gender, speed) from speech and a large language model to formulate text prompts based on the recognition results. Experiments on a large-scale (44K hours) speech dataset demonstrate that compared to the previous works, PromptTTS 2 generates voices more consistent with text prompts and supports the sampling of diverse voice variability, thereby offering users more choices on voice generation. Additionally, the prompt generation pipeline produces high-quality text prompts, eliminating the large labeling cost. The demo page of PromptTTS 2 is available online.

We introduce a neural-preconditioned iterative solver for Poisson equations with mixed boundary conditions. The Poisson equation is ubiquitous in scientific computing: it governs a wide array of physical phenomena, arises as a subproblem in many numerical algorithms, and serves as a model problem for the broader class of elliptic PDEs. The most popular Poisson discretizations yield large sparse linear systems. At high resolution, and for performance-critical applications, iterative solvers can be advantageous for these -- but only when paired with powerful preconditioners. The core of our solver is a neural network trained to approximate the inverse of a discrete structured-grid Laplace operator for a domain of arbitrary shape and with mixed boundary conditions. The structure of this problem motivates a novel network architecture that we demonstrate is highly effective as a preconditioner even for boundary conditions outside the training set. We show that on challenging test cases arising from an incompressible fluid simulation, our method outperforms state-of-the-art solvers like algebraic multigrid as well as some recent neural preconditioners.

The past decade has witnessed significant advances in time series modeling with deep learning. While achieving state-of-the-art results, the best-performing architectures vary highly across applications and domains. Meanwhile, for natural language processing, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has demonstrated impressive performance via training one general-purpose model across various textual datasets. It is intriguing to explore whether GPT-type architectures can be effective for time series, capturing the intrinsic dynamic attributes and leading to significant accuracy improvements. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, TEMPO, that can effectively learn time series representations. We focus on utilizing two essential inductive biases of the time series task for pre-trained models: (i) decomposition of the complex interaction between trend, seasonal and residual components; and (ii) introducing the selection-based prompts to facilitate distribution adaptation in non-stationary time series. TEMPO expands the capability for dynamically modeling real-world temporal phenomena from data within diverse domains. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of TEMPO over state-of-the-art methods on a number of time series benchmark datasets. This performance gain is observed not only in standard supervised learning settings but also in scenarios involving previously unseen datasets as well as in scenarios with multi-modal inputs. This compelling finding highlights TEMPO's potential to constitute a foundational model-building framework.

Hierarchical time series are common in several applied fields. The forecasts for these time series are required to be coherent, that is, to satisfy the constraints given by the hierarchy. The most popular technique to enforce coherence is called reconciliation, which adjusts the base forecasts computed for each time series. However, recent works on probabilistic reconciliation present several limitations. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on conditioning to reconcile any type of forecast distribution. We then introduce a new algorithm, called Bottom-Up Importance Sampling, to efficiently sample from the reconciled distribution. It can be used for any base forecast distribution: discrete, continuous, or in the form of samples, providing a major speedup compared to the current methods. Experiments on several temporal hierarchies show a significant improvement over base probabilistic forecasts.  ( 2 min )

Lion (Evolved Sign Momentum), a new optimizer discovered through program search, has shown promising results in training large AI models. It performs comparably or favorably to AdamW but with greater memory efficiency. As we can expect from the results of a random search program, Lion incorporates elements from several existing algorithms, including signed momentum, decoupled weight decay, Polak, and Nesterov momentum, but does not fit into any existing category of theoretically grounded optimizers. Thus, even though Lion appears to perform well as a general-purpose optimizer for a wide range of tasks, its theoretical basis remains uncertain. This lack of theoretical clarity limits opportunities to further enhance and expand Lion's efficacy. This work aims to demystify Lion. Based on both continuous-time and discrete-time analysis, we demonstrate that Lion is a theoretically novel and principled approach for minimizing a general loss function $f(x)$ while enforcing a bound constraint $\|x\|_\infty \leq 1/\lambda$. Lion achieves this through the incorporation of decoupled weight decay, where $\lambda$ represents the weight decay coefficient. Our analysis is made possible by the development of a new Lyapunov function for the Lion updates. It applies to a broader family of Lion-$\kappa$ algorithms, where the $\text{sign}(\cdot)$ operator in Lion is replaced by the subgradient of a convex function $\kappa$, leading to the solution of a general composite optimization problem of $\min_x f(x) + \kappa^*(x)$. Our findings provide valuable insights into the dynamics of Lion and pave the way for further improvements and extensions of Lion-related algorithms.

Matrix-variate distributions are a recent addition to the model-based clustering field, thereby making it possible to analyze data in matrix form with complex structure such as images and time series. Due to its recent appearance, there is limited literature on matrix-variate data, with even less on dealing with outliers in these models. An approach for clustering matrix-variate normal data with outliers is discussed. The approach, which uses the distribution of subset log-likelihoods, extends the OCLUST algorithm to matrix-variate normal data and uses an iterative approach to detect and trim outliers.

Federated Learning (FL) has surged in prominence due to its capability of collaborative model training without direct data sharing. However, the vast disparity in local data distributions among clients, often termed the non-Independent Identically Distributed (non-IID) challenge, poses a significant hurdle to FL's generalization efficacy. The scenario becomes even more complex when not all clients participate in the training process, a common occurrence due to unstable network connections or limited computational capacities. This can greatly complicate the assessment of the trained models' generalization abilities. While a plethora of recent studies has centered on the generalization gap pertaining to unseen data from participating clients with diverse distributions, the divergence between the training distributions of participating clients and the testing distributions of non-participating ones has been largely overlooked. In response, our paper unveils an information-theoretic generalization framework for FL. Specifically, it quantifies generalization errors by evaluating the information entropy of local distributions and discerning discrepancies across these distributions. Inspired by our deduced generalization bounds, we introduce a weighted aggregation approach and a duo of client selection strategies. These innovations aim to bolster FL's generalization prowess by encompassing a more varied set of client data distributions. Our extensive empirical evaluations reaffirm the potency of our proposed methods, aligning seamlessly with our theoretical construct.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have demonstrated the capability to achieve comparable performance to deep neural networks (DNNs) in both visual and linguistic domains while offering the advantages of improved energy efficiency and adherence to biological plausibility. However, the extension of such single-modality SNNs into the realm of multimodal scenarios remains an unexplored territory. Drawing inspiration from the concept of contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP), we introduce a novel framework, named SpikeCLIP, to address the gap between two modalities within the context of spike-based computing through a two-step recipe involving ``Alignment Pre-training + Dual-Loss Fine-tuning". Extensive experiments demonstrate that SNNs achieve comparable results to their DNN counterparts while significantly reducing energy consumption across a variety of datasets commonly used for multimodal model evaluation. Furthermore, SpikeCLIP maintains robust performance in image classification tasks that involve class labels not predefined within specific categories.

We present the Grasp Proposal Network (GP-net), a Convolutional Neural Network model which can generate 6-DoF grasps from flexible viewpoints, e.g. as experienced by mobile manipulators. To train GP-net, we synthetically generate a dataset containing depth-images and ground-truth grasp information. In real-world experiments, we use the EGAD evaluation benchmark to evaluate GP-net against two commonly used algorithms, the Volumetric Grasping Network (VGN) and the Grasp Pose Detection package (GPD), on a PAL TIAGo mobile manipulator. In contrast to the state-of-the-art methods in robotic grasping, GP-net can be used for grasping objects from flexible, unknown viewpoints without the need to define the workspace and achieves a grasp success of 54.4% compared to 51.6% for VGN and 44.2% for GPD. We provide a ROS package along with our code and pre-trained models at https://aucoroboticsmu.github.io/GP-net/.

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning approach where independent learners process data privately. Its goal is to create a robust and accurate model by aggregating and retraining local models over multiple rounds. However, FL faces challenges regarding data heterogeneity and model aggregation effectiveness. In order to simulate real-world data, researchers use methods for data partitioning that transform a dataset designated for centralized learning into a group of sub-datasets suitable for distributed machine learning with different data heterogeneity. In this paper, we study the currently popular data partitioning techniques and visualize their main disadvantages: the lack of precision in the data diversity, which leads to unreliable heterogeneity indexes, and the inability to incrementally challenge the FL algorithms. To resolve this problem, we propose a method that leverages entropy and symmetry to construct 'the most challenging' and controllable data distributions with gradual difficulty. We introduce a metric to measure data heterogeneity among the learning agents and a transformation technique that divides any dataset into splits with precise data diversity. Through a comparative study, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing FL data partitioning approaches, showcasing its potential to challenge model aggregation algorithms. Experimental results indicate that our approach gradually challenges the FL strategies, and the models trained on FedSym distributions are more distinct.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding across various domains, including healthcare and finance. For some tasks, LLMs achieve similar or better performance than trained human beings, therefore it is reasonable to employ human exams (e.g., certification tests) to assess the performance of LLMs. We present a comprehensive evaluation of popular LLMs, such as Llama 2 and GPT, on their ability to answer agriculture-related questions. In our evaluation, we also employ RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and ER (Ensemble Refinement) techniques, which combine information retrieval, generation capabilities, and prompting strategies to improve the LLMs' performance. To demonstrate the capabilities of LLMs, we selected agriculture exams and benchmark datasets from three of the largest agriculture producer countries: Brazil, India, and the USA. Our analysis highlights GPT-4's ability to achieve a passing score on exams to earn credits for renewing agronomist certifications, answering 93% of the questions correctly and outperforming earlier general-purpose models, which achieved 88% accuracy. On one of our experiments, GPT-4 obtained the highest performance when compared to human subjects. This performance suggests that GPT-4 could potentially pass on major graduate education admission tests or even earn credits for renewing agronomy certificates. We also explore the models' capacity to address general agriculture-related questions and generate crop management guidelines for Brazilian and Indian farmers, utilizing robust datasets from the Brazilian Agency of Agriculture (Embrapa) and graduate program exams from India. The results suggest that GPT-4, ER, and RAG can contribute meaningfully to agricultural education, assessment, and crop management practice, offering valuable insights to farmers and agricultural professionals.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning due to model overconfidence, often without awareness of their epistemological limits. We hypothesize that ``neural collapse'', a phenomenon affecting in-distribution data for models trained beyond loss convergence, also influences OOD data. To benefit from this interplay, we introduce NECO, a novel post-hoc method for OOD detection, which leverages the geometric properties of ``neural collapse'' and of principal component spaces to identify OOD data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NECO achieves state-of-the-art results on both small and large-scale OOD detection tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across different network architectures. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of our method in OOD detection. We plan to release the code after the anonymity period.

Generalizable implicit neural representation (INR) enables a single continuous function, i.e., a coordinate-based neural network, to represent multiple data instances by modulating its weights or intermediate features using latent codes. However, the expressive power of the state-of-the-art modulation is limited due to its inability to localize and capture fine-grained details of data entities such as specific pixels and rays. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for generalizable INR that combines a transformer encoder with a locality-aware INR decoder. The transformer encoder predicts a set of latent tokens from a data instance to encode local information into each latent token. The locality-aware INR decoder extracts a modulation vector by selectively aggregating the latent tokens via cross-attention for a coordinate input and then predicts the output by progressively decoding with coarse-to-fine modulation through multiple frequency bandwidths. The selective token aggregation and the multi-band feature modulation enable us to learn locality-aware representation in spatial and spectral aspects, respectively. Our framework significantly outperforms previous generalizable INRs and validates the usefulness of the locality-aware latents for downstream tasks such as image generation.

The proliferation of large AI models trained on uncurated, often sensitive web-scraped data has raised significant privacy concerns. One of the concerns is that adversaries can extract information about the training data using privacy attacks. Unfortunately, the task of removing specific information from the models without sacrificing performance is not straightforward and has proven to be challenging. We propose a rather easy yet effective defense based on backdoor attacks to remove private information such as names of individuals from models, and focus in this work on text encoders. Specifically, through strategic insertion of backdoors, we align the embeddings of sensitive phrases with those of neutral terms-"a person" instead of the person's name. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our backdoor-based defense on CLIP by assessing its performance using a specialized privacy attack for zero-shot classifiers. Our approach provides not only a new "dual-use" perspective on backdoor attacks, but also presents a promising avenue to enhance the privacy of individuals within models trained on uncurated web-scraped data.

Sparse logistic regression is for classification and feature selection simultaneously. Although many studies have been done to solve $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression, there is no equivalently abundant work on solving sparse logistic regression with nonconvex regularization term. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to solve $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression, which can be naturally extended to nonconvex regularization term, as long as certain requirement is satisfied. In addition, we also utilize a different line search criteria to guarantee monotone convergence for various regularization terms. Empirical experiments on binary classification tasks with real-world datasets demonstrate our proposed algorithms are capable of performing classification and feature selection effectively at a lower computational cost.

Recently, contrastive learning has become a key component in fine-tuning code search models for software development efficiency and effectiveness. It pulls together positive code snippets while pushing negative samples away given search queries. Among contrastive learning, InfoNCE is the most widely used loss function due to its better performance. However, the following problems in negative samples of InfoNCE may deteriorate its representation learning: 1) The existence of false negative samples in large code corpora due to duplications. 2). The failure to explicitly differentiate between the potential relevance of negative samples. As an example, a bubble sorting algorithm example is less ``negative'' than a file saving function for the quick sorting algorithm query. In this paper, we tackle the above problems by proposing a simple yet effective Soft-InfoNCE loss that inserts weight terms into InfoNCE. In our proposed loss function, we apply three methods to estimate the weights of negative pairs and show that the vanilla InfoNCE loss is a special case of Soft-InfoNCE. Theoretically, we analyze the effects of Soft-InfoNCE on controlling the distribution of learnt code representations and on deducing a more precise mutual information estimation. We furthermore discuss the superiority of proposed loss functions with other design alternatives. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Soft-InfoNCE and weights estimation methods under state-of-the-art code search models on a large-scale public dataset consisting of six programming languages. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Alex-HaochenLi/Soft-InfoNCE}.

In modern communication systems, efficient and reliable information dissemination is crucial for supporting critical operations across domains like disaster response, autonomous vehicles, and sensor networks. This paper introduces a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach as a significant step forward in achieving more decentralized, efficient, and collaborative solutions. We propose a Partially Observable Stochastic Game (POSG) formulation for information dissemination empowering each agent to decide on message forwarding independently, based on their one-hop neighborhood. This constitutes a significant paradigm shift from traditional heuristics based on Multi-Point Relay (MPR) selection. Our approach harnesses Graph Convolutional Reinforcement Learning, employing Graph Attention Networks (GAT) with dynamic attention to capture essential network features. We propose two approaches, L-DGN and HL-DGN, which differ in the information that is exchanged among agents. We evaluate the performance of our decentralized approaches, by comparing them with a widely-used MPR heuristic, and we show that our trained policies are able to efficiently cover the network while bypassing the MPR set selection process. Our approach is a first step toward supporting the resilience of real-world broadcast communication infrastructures via learned, collaborative information dissemination.

Proximal gradient-based optimization is one of the most common strategies to solve inverse problem of images, and it is easy to implement. However, these techniques often generate heavy artifacts in image reconstruction. One of the most popular refinement methods is to fine-tune the regularization parameter to alleviate such artifacts, but it may not always be sufficient or applicable due to increased computational costs. In this work, we propose a deep geometric incremental learning framework based on the second Nesterov proximal gradient optimization. The proposed end-to-end network not only has the powerful learning ability for high-/low-frequency image features, but also can theoretically guarantee that geometric texture details will be reconstructed from preliminary linear reconstruction. Furthermore, it can avoid the risk of intermediate reconstruction results falling outside the geometric decomposition domains and achieve fast convergence. Our reconstruction framework is decomposed into four modules including general linear reconstruction, cascade geometric incremental restoration, Nesterov acceleration, and post-processing. In the image restoration step, a cascade geometric incremental learning module is designed to compensate for missing texture information from different geometric spectral decomposition domains. Inspired by the overlap-tile strategy, we also develop a post-processing module to remove the block effect in patch-wise-based natural image reconstruction. All parameters in the proposed model are learnable, an adaptive initialization technique of physical parameters is also employed to make model flexibility and ensure converging smoothly. We compare the reconstruction performance of the proposed method with existing state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate its superiority. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/fanxiaohong/Nest-DGIL.

The accurate and efficient diagnosis of COVID-19 is of paramount importance, particularly in the context of large-scale medical imaging datasets. In this preprint paper, we propose a novel approach for COVID-19 diagnosis using CT images that leverages the power of Swin Transformer models, state-of-the-art solutions in computer vision tasks. Our method includes a systematic approach for patient-level predictions, where individual CT slices are classified as COVID-19 or non-COVID, and the patient's overall diagnosis is determined through majority voting. The application of the Swin Transformer in this context results in patient-level predictions that demonstrate exceptional diagnostic accuracy. In terms of evaluation metrics, our approach consistently outperforms the baseline, as well as numerous competing methods, showcasing its effectiveness in COVID-19 diagnosis. The macro F1 score achieved by our model exceeds the baseline and offers a robust solution for accurate diagnosis.

Foundation models (FM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks (especially in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision), primarily attributed to their ability to comprehend instructions and access extensive, high-quality data. This not only showcases their current effectiveness but also sets a promising trajectory towards the development of artificial general intelligence. Unfortunately, due to multiple constraints, the raw data of the model used for large model training are often inaccessible, so the use of end-to-end models for downstream tasks has become a new research trend, which we call Learn From Model (LFM) in this article. LFM focuses on the research, modification, and design of FM based on the model interface, so as to better understand the model structure and weights (in a black box environment), and to generalize the model to downstream tasks. The study of LFM techniques can be broadly categorized into five major areas: model tuning, model distillation, model reuse, meta learning and model editing. Each category encompasses a repertoire of methods and strategies that aim to enhance the capabilities and performance of FM. This paper gives a comprehensive review of the current methods based on FM from the perspective of LFM, in order to help readers better understand the current research status and ideas. To conclude, we summarize the survey by highlighting several critical areas for future exploration and addressing open issues that require further attention from the research community. The relevant papers we investigated in this article can be accessed at .

We observe the emergence of binary encoding within the latent space of deep-neural-network classifiers. Such binary encoding is induced by introducing a linear penultimate layer, which is equipped during training with a loss function that grows as $\exp(\vec{x}^2)$, where $\vec{x}$ are the coordinates in the latent space. The phenomenon we describe represents a specific instance of a well-documented occurrence known as \textit{neural collapse}, which arises in the terminal phase of training and entails the collapse of latent class means to the vertices of a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF). We show that binary encoding accelerates convergence toward the simplex ETF and enhances classification accuracy.

We refer to the setting where the (partial) derivatives of a neural network's (NN's) predictions with respect to its inputs are used as additional training signal as a derivative-constrained (DC) NN. This situation is common in physics-informed settings in the natural sciences. We propose an integrated RELU (IReLU) activation function to improve training of DC NNs. We also investigate denormalization and label rescaling to help stabilize DC training. We evaluate our methods on physics-informed settings including quantum chemistry and Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) tasks. We demonstrate that existing architectures with IReLU activations combined with denormalization and label rescaling better incorporate training signal provided by derivative constraints.

Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) are a popular family of continuous-depth deep learning models. In this work, we consider a large family of parameterized ODEs with continuous-in-time parameters, which include time-dependent neural ODEs. We derive a generalization bound for this class by a Lipschitz-based argument. By leveraging the analogy between neural ODEs and deep residual networks, our approach yields in particular a generalization bound for a class of deep residual networks. The bound involves the magnitude of the difference between successive weight matrices. We illustrate numerically how this quantity affects the generalization capability of neural networks.  ( 2 min )

Many evolutionary algorithms (EAs) take advantage of parallel evaluation of candidates. However, if evaluation times vary significantly, many worker nodes (i.e.,\ compute clients) are idle much of the time, waiting for the next generation to be created. Evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS), a class of EAs that optimizes the architecture and hyperparameters of deep neural networks, is particularly vulnerable to this issue. This paper proposes a generic asynchronous evaluation strategy (AES) that is then adapted to work with ENAS. AES increases throughput by maintaining a queue of up to $K$ individuals ready to be sent to the workers for evaluation and proceeding to the next generation as soon as $M<<K$ individuals have been evaluated. A suitable value for $M$ is determined experimentally, balancing diversity and efficiency. To showcase the generality and power of AES, it was first evaluated in eight-line sorting network design (a single-population optimization task with limited evaluation-time variability), achieving an over two-fold speedup. Next, it was evaluated in 11-bit multiplexer design (a single-population discovery task with extended variability), where a 14-fold speedup was observed. It was then scaled up to ENAS for image captioning (a multi-population open-ended-optimization task), resulting in an over two-fold speedup. In all problems, a multifold performance improvement was observed, suggesting that AES is a promising method for parallelizing the evolution of complex systems with long and variable evaluation times, such as those in ENAS.

Recent works have proposed that activations in language models can be modelled as sparse linear combinations of vectors corresponding to features of input text. Under this assumption, these works aimed to reconstruct feature directions using sparse coding. We develop metrics to assess the success of these sparse coding techniques and test the validity of the linearity and sparsity assumptions. We show our metrics can predict the level of sparsity on synthetic sparse linear activations, and can distinguish between sparse linear data and several other distributions. We use our metrics to measure levels of sparsity in several language models. We find evidence that language model activations can be accurately modelled by sparse linear combinations of features, significantly more so than control datasets. We also show that model activations appear to be sparsest in the first and final layers.

Prompt tuning (PT), where a small amount of trainable soft (continuous) prompt vectors is affixed to the input of language models (LM), has shown promising results across various tasks and models for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). PT stands out from other PEFT approaches because it maintains competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters and does not drastically scale up its parameters as the model size expands. However, PT introduces additional soft prompt tokens, leading to longer input sequences, which significantly impacts training and inference time and memory usage due to the Transformer's quadratic complexity. Particularly concerning for Large Language Models (LLMs) that face heavy daily querying. To address this issue, we propose Decomposed Prompt Tuning (DePT), which decomposes the soft prompt into a shorter soft prompt and a pair of low-rank matrices that are then optimised with two different learning rates. This allows DePT to achieve better performance while saving over 20% memory and time costs compared to vanilla PT and its variants, without changing trainable parameter sizes. Through extensive experiments on 23 natural language processing (NLP) and vision-language (VL) tasks, we demonstrate that DePT outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT approaches, including the full fine-tuning baseline in some scenarios. Additionally, we empirically show that DEPT grows more efficient as the model size increases. Our further study reveals that DePT integrates seamlessly with parameter-efficient transfer learning in the few-shot learning setting and highlights its adaptability to various model architectures and sizes.

In practice, deep neural networks are often able to easily interpolate their training data. To understand this phenomenon, many works have aimed to quantify the memorization capacity of a neural network architecture: the largest number of points such that the architecture can interpolate any placement of these points with any assignment of labels. For real-world data, however, one intuitively expects the presence of a benign structure so that interpolation already occurs at a smaller network size than suggested by memorization capacity. In this paper, we investigate interpolation by adopting an instance-specific viewpoint. We introduce a simple randomized algorithm that, given a fixed finite dataset with two classes, with high probability constructs an interpolating three-layer neural network in polynomial time. The required number of parameters is linked to geometric properties of the two classes and their mutual arrangement. As a result, we obtain guarantees that are independent of the number of samples and hence move beyond worst-case memorization capacity bounds. We illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm in non-pathological situations with extensive numerical experiments and link the insights back to the theoretical results.

A recent empirical observation (Li et al., 2022b) of activation sparsity in MLP blocks offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs for free. Although having attributed it to training dynamics, existing theoretical explanations of activation sparsity are restricted to shallow networks, small training steps and special training, despite its emergence in deep models standardly trained for a large number of steps. To fill these gaps, we propose the notion of gradient sparsity as one source of activation sparsity and a theoretical explanation based on it that sees sparsity a necessary step to adversarial robustness w.r.t. hidden features and parameters, which is approximately the flatness of minima for well-learned models. The theory applies to standardly trained LayerNorm-ed MLPs, and further to Transformers or other architectures trained with weight noises. Eliminating other sources of flatness except for sparsity, we discover the phenomenon that the ratio between the largest and smallest non-zero singular values of weight matrices is small. When discussing the emergence of this spectral concentration, we use random matrix theory (RMT) as a powerful tool to analyze stochastic gradient noises. Validational experiments are conducted to verify our gradient-sparsity-based explanation. We propose two plug-and-play modules for both training and finetuning for sparsity. Experiments on ImageNet-1k and C4 demonstrate their 50% sparsity improvements, indicating further potential cost reduction in both training and inference.

This letter proposes a novel relaying framework, semantic-forward (SF), for cooperative communications towards the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. The SF relay extracts and transmits the semantic features, which reduces forwarding payload, and also improves the network robustness against intra-link errors. Based on the theoretical basis for cooperative communications with side information and the turbo principle, we design a joint source-channel coding algorithm to iteratively exchange the extrinsic information for enhancing the decoding gains at the destination. Surprisingly, simulation results indicate that even in bad channel conditions, SF relaying can still effectively improve the recovered information quality.

Although it has been demonstrated that Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms are vulnerable to deliberate attacks, the question of whether such weaknesses can lead to software security threats is under-explored. To bridge this gap, we conducted vulnerability tests on Text-to-SQL systems that are commonly used to create natural language interfaces to databases. We showed that the Text-to-SQL modules within six commercial applications can be manipulated to produce malicious code, potentially leading to data breaches and Denial of Service attacks. This is the first demonstration that NLP models can be exploited as attack vectors in the wild. In addition, experiments using four open-source language models verified that straightforward backdoor attacks on Text-to-SQL systems achieve a 100% success rate without affecting their performance. The aim of this work is to draw the community's attention to potential software security issues associated with NLP algorithms and encourage exploration of methods to mitigate against them.

Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) aims to discover new scientific knowledge by mining papers and generating hypotheses. Standard LBD is limited to predicting pairwise relations between discrete concepts (e.g., drug-disease links), and ignores critical contexts like experimental settings (e.g., a specific patient population where a drug is evaluated) and background motivations (e.g., to find drugs without specific side effects). We address these limitations with a novel formulation of contextualized-LBD (C-LBD): generating scientific hypotheses in natural language, while grounding them in a context that controls the hypothesis search space. We present a modeling framework using retrieval of ``inspirations'' from past scientific papers. Our evaluations reveal that GPT-4 tends to generate ideas with overall low technical depth and novelty, while our inspiration prompting approaches partially mitigate this issue. Our work represents a first step toward building language models that generate new ideas derived from scientific literature.  ( 2 min )

This work identifies a simple pre-training mechanism that leads to representations exhibiting better continual and transfer learning. This mechanism -- the repeated resetting of weights in the last layer, which we nickname "zapping" -- was originally designed for a meta-continual-learning procedure, yet we show it is surprisingly applicable in many settings beyond both meta-learning and continual learning. In our experiments, we wish to transfer a pre-trained image classifier to a new set of classes, in a few shots. We show that our zapping procedure results in improved transfer accuracy and/or more rapid adaptation in both standard fine-tuning and continual learning settings, while being simple to implement and computationally efficient. In many cases, we achieve performance on par with state of the art meta-learning without needing the expensive higher-order gradients, by using a combination of zapping and sequential learning. An intuitive explanation for the effectiveness of this zapping procedure is that representations trained with repeated zapping learn features that are capable of rapidly adapting to newly initialized classifiers. Such an approach may be considered a computationally cheaper type of, or alternative to, meta-learning rapidly adaptable features with higher-order gradients. This adds to recent work on the usefulness of resetting neural network parameters during training, and invites further investigation of this mechanism.

We propose to replace vector quantization (VQ) in the latent representation of VQ-VAEs with a simple scheme termed finite scalar quantization (FSQ), where we project the VAE representation down to a few dimensions (typically less than 10). Each dimension is quantized to a small set of fixed values, leading to an (implicit) codebook given by the product of these sets. By appropriately choosing the number of dimensions and values each dimension can take, we obtain the same codebook size as in VQ. On top of such discrete representations, we can train the same models that have been trained on VQ-VAE representations. For example, autoregressive and masked transformer models for image generation, multimodal generation, and dense prediction computer vision tasks. Concretely, we employ FSQ with MaskGIT for image generation, and with UViM for depth estimation, colorization, and panoptic segmentation. Despite the much simpler design of FSQ, we obtain competitive performance in all these tasks. We emphasize that FSQ does not suffer from codebook collapse and does not need the complex machinery employed in VQ (commitment losses, codebook reseeding, code splitting, entropy penalties, etc.) to learn expressive discrete representations.

Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance on many generative tasks. Despite recent success, most diffusion models are restricted in that they only allow linear transformation of the data distribution. In contrast, broader family of transformations can potentially help train generative distributions more efficiently, simplifying the reverse process and closing the gap between the true negative log-likelihood and the variational approximation. In this paper, we present Neural Diffusion Models (NDMs), a generalization of conventional diffusion models that enables defining and learning time-dependent non-linear transformations of data. We show how to optimise NDMs using a variational bound in a simulation-free setting. Moreover, we derive a time-continuous formulation of NDMs, which allows fast and reliable inference using off-the-shelf numerical ODE and SDE solvers. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of NDMs with learnable transformations through experiments on standard image generation benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, downsampled versions of ImageNet and CelebA-HQ. NDMs outperform conventional diffusion models in terms of likelihood and produce high-quality samples.

Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) and its variants are the best algorithms so far for solving large-scale incomplete information games. However, we believe that there are two problems with CFR: First, matrix multiplication is required in CFR iteration, and the time complexity of one iteration is too high; Secondly, the game characteristics in the real world are different. Just using one CFR algorithm will not be perfectly suitable for all game problems. For these two problems, this paper proposes a new algorithm called Pure CFR (PCFR) based on CFR. PCFR can be seen as a combination of CFR and Fictitious Play (FP), inheriting the concept of counterfactual regret (value) from CFR, and using the best response strategy instead of the regret matching strategy for the next iteration. This algorithm has three advantages. First, PCFR can be combined with any CFR variant. The resulting Pure MCCFR (PMCCFR) can significantly reduce the time and space complexity of one iteration. Secondly, our experiments show that the convergence speed of the PMCCFR is 2$\sim$3 times that of the MCCFR. Finally, there is a type of game that is very suitable for PCFR, we call this type of game clear-game, which is characterized by a high proportion of dominated strategies. Experiments show that in clear-game, the convergence rate of PMCCFR is two orders of magnitude higher than that of MCCFR.

Federated Learning (FL) methods adopt efficient communication technologies to distribute machine learning tasks across edge devices, reducing the overhead in terms of data storage and computational complexity compared to centralized solutions. Rather than moving large data volumes from producers (sensors, machines) to energy-hungry data centers, raising environmental concerns due to resource demands, FL provides an alternative solution to mitigate the energy demands of several learning tasks while enabling new Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications. This paper proposes a framework for real-time monitoring of the energy and carbon footprint impacts of FL systems. The carbon tracking tool is evaluated for consensus (fully decentralized) and classical FL policies. For the first time, we present a quantitative evaluation of different computationally and communication efficient FL methods from the perspectives of energy consumption and carbon equivalent emissions, suggesting also general guidelines for energy-efficient design. Results indicate that consensus-driven FL implementations should be preferred for limiting carbon emissions when the energy efficiency of the communication is low (i.e., < 25 Kbit/Joule). Besides, quantization and sparsification operations are shown to strike a balance between learning performances and energy consumption, leading to sustainable FL designs.

The rapid increase in the number of cyber-attacks in recent years raises the need for principled methods for defending networks against malicious actors. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for mitigating these attacks. However, while DRL has shown much potential for cyber-defence, numerous challenges must be overcome before DRL can be applied to autonomous cyber-operations (ACO) at scale. Principled methods are required for environments that confront learners with very high-dimensional state spaces, large multi-discrete action spaces, and adversarial learning. Recent works have reported success in solving these problems individually. There have also been impressive engineering efforts towards solving all three for real-time strategy games. However, applying DRL to the full ACO problem remains an open challenge. Here, we survey the relevant DRL literature and conceptualize an idealised ACO-DRL agent. We provide: i.) A summary of the domain properties that define the ACO problem; ii.) A comprehensive evaluation of the extent to which domains used for benchmarking DRL approaches are comparable to ACO; iii.) An overview of state-of-the-art approaches for scaling DRL to domains that confront learners with the curse of dimensionality, and; iv.) A survey and critique of current methods for limiting the exploitability of agents within adversarial settings from the perspective of ACO. We conclude with open research questions that we hope will motivate future directions for researchers and practitioners working on ACO.

We characterize the statistical efficiency of knowledge transfer through $n$ samples from a teacher to a probabilistic student classifier with input space $\mathcal S$ over labels $\mathcal A$. We show that privileged information at three progressive levels accelerates the transfer. At the first level, only samples with hard labels are known, via which the maximum likelihood estimator attains the minimax rate $\sqrt{{|{\mathcal S}||{\mathcal A}|}/{n}}$. The second level has the teacher probabilities of sampled labels available in addition, which turns out to boost the convergence rate lower bound to ${{|{\mathcal S}||{\mathcal A}|}/{n}}$. However, under this second data acquisition protocol, minimizing a naive adaptation of the cross-entropy loss results in an asymptotically biased student. We overcome this limitation and achieve the fundamental limit by using a novel empirical variant of the squared error logit loss. The third level further equips the student with the soft labels (complete logits) on ${\mathcal A}$ given every sampled input, thereby provably enables the student to enjoy a rate ${|{\mathcal S}|}/{n}$ free of $|{\mathcal A}|$. We find any Kullback-Leibler divergence minimizer to be optimal in the last case. Numerical simulations distinguish the four learners and corroborate our theory.

Discovering achievements with a hierarchical structure in procedurally generated environments presents a significant challenge. This requires an agent to possess a broad range of abilities, including generalization and long-term reasoning. Many prior methods have been built upon model-based or hierarchical approaches, with the belief that an explicit module for long-term planning would be advantageous for learning hierarchical dependencies. However, these methods demand an excessive number of environment interactions or large model sizes, limiting their practicality. In this work, we demonstrate that proximal policy optimization (PPO), a simple yet versatile model-free algorithm, outperforms previous methods when optimized with recent implementation practices. Moreover, we find that the PPO agent can predict the next achievement to be unlocked to some extent, albeit with limited confidence. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel contrastive learning method, called achievement distillation, which strengthens the agent's ability to predict the next achievement. Our method exhibits a strong capacity for discovering hierarchical achievements and shows state-of-the-art performance on the challenging Crafter environment in a sample-efficient manner while utilizing fewer model parameters.

Regression on manifolds, and, more broadly, statistics on manifolds, has garnered significant importance in recent years due to the vast number of applications for this type of data. Circular data is a classic example, but so is data in the space of covariance matrices, data on the Grassmannian manifold obtained as a result of principal component analysis, among many others. In this work we investigate prediction sets for regression scenarios when the response variable, denoted by $Y$, resides in a manifold, and the covariable, denoted by X, lies in Euclidean space. This extends the concepts delineated in [Lei and Wasserman, 2014] to this novel context. Aligning with traditional principles in conformal inference, these prediction sets are distribution-free, indicating that no specific assumptions are imposed on the joint distribution of $(X, Y)$, and they maintain a non-parametric character. We prove the asymptotic almost sure convergence of the empirical version of these regions on the manifold to their population counterparts. The efficiency of this method is shown through a comprehensive simulation study and an analysis involving real-world data.

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning techniques such as behavior cloning is to find a policy that achieves a higher average return than the trajectories constituting the dataset. However, we empirically find that when a dataset is dominated by suboptimal trajectories, state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms do not substantially improve over the average return of trajectories in the dataset. We argue this is due to an assumption made by current offline RL algorithms of staying close to the trajectories in the dataset. If the dataset primarily consists of sub-optimal trajectories, this assumption forces the policy to mimic the suboptimal actions. We overcome this issue by proposing a sampling strategy that enables the policy to only be constrained to ``good data" rather than all actions in the dataset (i.e., uniform sampling). We present a realization of the sampling strategy and an algorithm that can be used as a plug-and-play module in standard offline RL algorithms. Our evaluation demonstrates significant performance gains in 72 imbalanced datasets, D4RL dataset, and across three different offline RL algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/Improbable-AI/dw-offline-rl.

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) refers to learning general-purpose skills that aim to reach diverse goals. In particular, offline GCRL only requires purely pre-collected datasets to perform training tasks without additional interactions with the environment. Although offline GCRL has become increasingly prevalent and many previous works have demonstrated its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of efficient offline GCRL algorithms is not well established, especially when the state space is huge and the offline dataset only covers the policy we aim to learn. In this paper, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of an existing empirically successful offline GCRL algorithm. We prove that under slight modification, this algorithm enjoys an $\widetilde{O}(\text{poly}(1/\epsilon))$ sample complexity (where $\epsilon$ is the desired suboptimality of the learned policy) with general function approximation thanks to the property of (semi-)strong convexity of the objective functions. We only require nearly minimal assumptions on the dataset (single-policy concentrability) and the function class (realizability). Moreover, this algorithm consists of two uninterleaved optimization steps, which we refer to as $V$-learning and policy learning, and is computationally stable since it does not involve minimax optimization. We also empirically validate our theory by showing that the modified algorithm outperforms the previous algorithm in various real-world environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that is both provably efficient with general function approximation and single-policy concentrability, and empirically successful without requiring solving minimax optimization problems.  ( 3 min )

Poisoning of data sets is a potential security threat to large language models that can lead to backdoored models. A description of the internal mechanisms of backdoored language models and how they process trigger inputs, e.g., when switching to toxic language, has yet to be found. In this work, we study the internal representations of transformer-based backdoored language models and determine early-layer MLP modules as most important for the backdoor mechanism in combination with the initial embedding projection. We use this knowledge to remove, insert, and modify backdoor mechanisms with engineered replacements that reduce the MLP module outputs to essentials for the backdoor mechanism. To this end, we introduce PCP ablation, where we replace transformer modules with low-rank matrices based on the principal components of their activations. We demonstrate our results on backdoored toy, backdoored large, and non-backdoored open-source models. We show that we can improve the backdoor robustness of large language models by locally constraining individual modules during fine-tuning on potentially poisonous data sets. Trigger warning: Offensive language.

We propose a time series forecasting method named Quantum Gramian Angular Field (QGAF). This approach merges the advantages of quantum computing technology with deep learning, aiming to enhance the precision of time series classification and forecasting. We successfully transformed stock return time series data into two-dimensional images suitable for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) training by designing specific quantum circuits. Distinct from the classical Gramian Angular Field (GAF) approach, QGAF's uniqueness lies in eliminating the need for data normalization and inverse cosine calculations, simplifying the transformation process from time series data to two-dimensional images. To validate the effectiveness of this method, we conducted experiments on datasets from three major stock markets: the China A-share market, the Hong Kong stock market, and the US stock market. Experimental results revealed that compared to the classical GAF method, the QGAF approach significantly improved time series prediction accuracy, reducing prediction errors by an average of 25% for Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and 48% for Mean Squared Error (MSE). This research confirms the potential and promising prospects of integrating quantum computing with deep learning techniques in financial time series forecasting.

Interpretable policy learning seeks to estimate intelligible decision policies from observed actions; however, existing models fall short by forcing a tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability. This tradeoff limits data-driven interpretations of human decision-making process. e.g. to audit medical decisions for biases and suboptimal practices, we require models of decision processes which provide concise descriptions of complex behaviors. Fundamentally, existing approaches are burdened by this tradeoff because they represent the underlying decision process as a universal policy, when in fact human decisions are dynamic and can change drastically with contextual information. Thus, we propose Contextualized Policy Recovery (CPR), which re-frames the problem of modeling complex decision processes as a multi-task learning problem in which complex decision policies are comprised of context-specific policies. CPR models each context-specific policy as a linear observation-to-action mapping, and generates new decision models $\textit{on-demand}$ as contexts are updated with new observations. CPR is compatible with fully offline and partially observable decision environments, and can be tailored to incorporate any recurrent black-box model or interpretable decision model. We assess CPR through studies on simulated and real data, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the canonical tasks of predicting antibiotic prescription in intensive care units ($+22\%$ AUROC vs. previous SOTA) and predicting MRI prescription for Alzheimer's patients ($+7.7\%$ AUROC vs. previous SOTA). With this improvement in predictive performance, CPR closes the accuracy gap between interpretable and black-box methods for policy learning, allowing high-resolution exploration and analysis of context-specific decision models.

Recent research on time-series self-supervised models shows great promise in learning semantic representations. However, it has been limited to small-scale datasets, e.g., thousands of temporal sequences. In this work, we make key technical contributions that are tailored to the numerical properties of time-series data and allow the model to scale to large datasets, e.g., millions of temporal sequences. We adopt the Transformer architecture by first partitioning the input into non-overlapping windows. Each window is then characterized by its normalized shape and two scalar values denoting the mean and standard deviation within each window. To embed scalar values that may possess arbitrary numerical scales to high-dimensional vectors, we propose a numerically multi-scaled embedding module enumerating all possible scales for the scalar values. The model undergoes pretraining using the proposed numerically multi-scaled embedding with a simple contrastive objective on a large-scale dataset containing over a million sequences. We study its transfer performance on a number of univariate and multivariate classification benchmarks. Our method exhibits remarkable improvement against previous representation learning approaches and establishes the new state of the art, even compared with domain-specific non-learning-based methods.

Multimodal sensors provide complementary information to develop accurate machine-learning methods for human activity recognition (HAR), but introduce significantly higher computational load, which reduces efficiency. This paper proposes an efficient multimodal neural architecture for HAR using an RGB camera and inertial measurement units (IMUs) called Multimodal Temporal Segment Attention Network (MMTSA). MMTSA first transforms IMU sensor data into a temporal and structure-preserving gray-scale image using the Gramian Angular Field (GAF), representing the inherent properties of human activities. MMTSA then applies a multimodal sparse sampling method to reduce data redundancy. Lastly, MMTSA adopts an inter-segment attention module for efficient multimodal fusion. Using three well-established public datasets, we evaluated MMTSA's effectiveness and efficiency in HAR. Results show that our method achieves superior performance improvements 11.13% of cross-subject F1-score on the MMAct dataset than the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The ablation study and analysis suggest that MMTSA's effectiveness in fusing multimodal data for accurate HAR. The efficiency evaluation on an edge device showed that MMTSA achieved significantly better accuracy, lower computational load, and lower inference latency than SOTA methods.  ( 2 min )

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are considered cutting-edge technology with highly cost-effective and flexible usage scenarios. Although many papers have reviewed the application of UAVs in agriculture, the review of the application for tree detection is still insufficient. This paper focuses on tree detection methods applied to UAV data collected by UAVs. There are two kinds of data, the point cloud and the images, which are acquired by the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor and camera, respectively. Among the detection methods using point-cloud data, this paper mainly classifies these methods according to LiDAR and Digital Aerial Photography (DAP). For the detection methods using images directly, this paper reviews these methods by whether or not to use the Deep Learning (DL) method. Our review concludes and analyses the comparison and combination between the application of LiDAR-based and DAP-based point cloud data. The performance, relative merits, and application fields of the methods are also introduced. Meanwhile, this review counts the number of tree detection studies using different methods in recent years. From our statics, the detection task using DL methods on the image has become a mainstream trend as the number of DL-based detection researches increases to 45% of the total number of tree detection studies up to 2022. As a result, this review could help and guide researchers who want to carry out tree detection on specific forests and for farmers to use UAVs in managing agriculture production.

We study core-set construction algorithms for the task of Diversity Maximization under fairness/partition constraint. Given a set of points $P$ in a metric space partitioned into $m$ groups, and given $k_1,\ldots,k_m$, the goal of this problem is to pick $k_i$ points from each group $i$ such that the overall diversity of the $k=\sum_i k_i$ picked points is maximized. We consider two natural diversity measures: sum-of-pairwise distances and sum-of-nearest-neighbor distances, and show improved core-set construction algorithms with respect to these measures. More precisely, we show the first constant factor core-set w.r.t. sum-of-pairwise distances whose size is independent of the size of the dataset and the aspect ratio. Second, we show the first core-set w.r.t. the sum-of-nearest-neighbor distances. Finally, we run several experiments showing the effectiveness of our core-set approach. In particular, we apply constrained diversity maximization to summarize a set of timed messages that takes into account the messages' recency. Specifically, the summary should include more recent messages compared to older ones. This is a real task in one of the largest communication platforms, affecting the experience of hundreds of millions daily active users. By utilizing our core-set method for this task, we achieve a 100x speed-up while losing the diversity by only a few percent. Moreover, our approach allows us to improve the space usage of the algorithm in the streaming setting.

Recently, Meta-Black-Box Optimization with Reinforcement Learning (MetaBBO-RL) has showcased the power of leveraging RL at the meta-level to mitigate manual fine-tuning of low-level black-box optimizers. However, this field is hindered by the lack of a unified benchmark. To fill this gap, we introduce MetaBox, the first benchmark platform expressly tailored for developing and evaluating MetaBBO-RL methods. MetaBox offers a flexible algorithmic template that allows users to effortlessly implement their unique designs within the platform. Moreover, it provides a broad spectrum of over 300 problem instances, collected from synthetic to realistic scenarios, and an extensive library of 19 baseline methods, including both traditional black-box optimizers and recent MetaBBO-RL methods. Besides, MetaBox introduces three standardized performance metrics, enabling a more thorough assessment of the methods. In a bid to illustrate the utility of MetaBox for facilitating rigorous evaluation and in-depth analysis, we carry out a wide-ranging benchmarking study on existing MetaBBO-RL methods. Our MetaBox is open-source and accessible at: https://github.com/GMC-DRL/MetaBox.

Motivated by the computational difficulties incurred by popular deep learning algorithms for the generative modeling of temporal densities, we propose a cheap alternative which requires minimal hyperparameter tuning and scales favorably to high dimensional problems. In particular, we use a projection-based optimal transport solver [Meng et al., 2019] to join successive samples and subsequently use transport splines [Chewi et al., 2020] to interpolate the evolving density. When the sampling frequency is sufficiently high, the optimal maps are close to the identity and are thus computationally efficient to compute. Moreover, the training process is highly parallelizable as all optimal maps are independent and can thus be learned simultaneously. Finally, the approach is based solely on numerical linear algebra rather than minimizing a nonconvex objective function, allowing us to easily analyze and control the algorithm. We present several numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the efficiency of our method. In particular, these experiments show that the proposed approach is highly competitive compared with state-of-the-art normalizing flows conditioned on time across a wide range of dimensionalities.

This study proposes an interpretable neural network-based non-proportional odds model (N$^3$POM) for ordinal regression. N$^3$POM is different from conventional approaches to ordinal regression with non-proportional models in several ways: (1) N$^3$POM is designed to directly handle continuous responses, whereas standard methods typically treat de facto ordered continuous variables as discrete, (2) instead of estimating response-dependent finite coefficients of linear models from discrete responses as is done in conventional approaches, we train a non-linear neural network to serve as a coefficient function. Thanks to the neural network, N$^3$POM offers flexibility while preserving the interpretability of conventional ordinal regression. We establish a sufficient condition under which the predicted conditional cumulative probability locally satisfies the monotonicity constraint over a user-specified region in the covariate space. Additionally, we provide a monotonicity-preserving stochastic (MPS) algorithm for effectively training the neural network. We apply N$^3$POM to several real-world datasets.

Training machine learning models robust to distribution shifts is critical for real-world applications. Some robust training algorithms (e.g., Group DRO) specialize to group shifts and require group information on all training points. Other methods (e.g., CVaR DRO) that do not need group annotations can be overly conservative, since they naively upweight high loss points which may form a contrived set that does not correspond to any meaningful group in the real world (e.g., when the high loss points are randomly mislabeled training points). In this work, we address limitations in prior approaches by assuming a more nuanced form of group shift: conditioned on the label, we assume that the true group function (indicator over group) is simple. For example, we may expect that group shifts occur along low bitrate features (e.g., image background, lighting). Thus, we aim to learn a model that maintains high accuracy on simple group functions realized by these low bitrate features, that need not spend valuable model capacity achieving high accuracy on contrived groups of examples. Based on this, we consider the two-player game formulation of DRO where the adversary's capacity is bitrate-constrained. Our resulting practical algorithm, Bitrate-Constrained DRO (BR-DRO), does not require group information on training samples yet matches the performance of Group DRO on datasets that have training group annotations and that of CVaR DRO on long-tailed distributions. Our theoretical analysis reveals that in some settings BR-DRO objective can provably yield statistically efficient and less conservative solutions than unconstrained CVaR DRO.

Attention mechanisms have exhibited promising potential in enhancing learning models by identifying salient portions of input data. This is particularly valuable in scenarios where limited training samples are accessible due to challenges in data collection and labeling. Drawing inspiration from human recognition processes, we posit that an AI baseline's performance could be more accurate and dependable if it is exposed to essential segments of raw data rather than the entire input dataset, akin to human perception. However, the task of selecting these informative data segments, referred to as hard attention finding, presents a formidable challenge. In situations with few training samples, existing studies struggle to locate such informative regions due to the large number of training parameters that cannot be effectively learned from the available limited samples. In this study, we introduce a novel and practical framework for achieving explainable hard attention finding, specifically tailored for few-shot learning scenarios, called FewXAT. Our approach employs deep reinforcement learning to implement the concept of hard attention, directly impacting raw input data and thus rendering the process interpretable for human understanding. Through extensive experimentation across various benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method.

A flow control system is a critical concept for increasing the production capacity of manufacturing systems. To solve the scheduling optimization problem related to the flow control with the aim of improving productivity, existing methods depend on a heuristic design by domain human experts. Therefore, the methods require correction, monitoring, and verification by using real equipment. As system designs increase in complexity, the monitoring time increases, which decreases the probability of arriving at the optimal design. As an alternative approach to the heuristic design of flow control systems, the use of deep reinforcement learning to solve the scheduling optimization problem has been considered. Although the existing research on reinforcement learning has yielded excellent performance in some areas, the applicability of the results to actual FAB such as display and semiconductor manufacturing processes is not evident so far. To this end, we propose a method to implement a physical simulation environment and devise a feasible flow control system design using a transfer robot in display manufacturing through reinforcement learning. We present a model and parameter setting to build a virtual environment for different display transfer robots, and training methods of reinforcement learning on the environment to obtain an optimal scheduling of glass flow control systems. Its feasibility was verified by using different types of robots used in the actual process.

Riemannian geometry provides us with powerful tools to explore the latent space of generative models while preserving the underlying structure of the data. The latent space can be equipped it with a Riemannian metric, pulled back from the data manifold. With this metric, we can systematically navigate the space relying on geodesics defined as the shortest curves between two points. Generative models are often stochastic, causing the data space, the Riemannian metric, and the geodesics, to be stochastic as well. Stochastic objects are at best impractical, and at worst impossible, to manipulate. A common solution is to approximate the stochastic pullback metric by its expectation. But the geodesics derived from this expected Riemannian metric do not correspond to the expected length-minimising curves. In this work, we propose another metric whose geodesics explicitly minimise the expected length of the pullback metric. We show this metric defines a Finsler metric, and we compare it with the expected Riemannian metric. In high dimensions, we prove that both metrics converge to each other at a rate of $O\left(\frac{1}{D}\right)$. This convergence implies that the established expected Riemannian metric is an accurate approximation of the theoretically more grounded Finsler metric. This provides justification for using the expected Riemannian metric for practical implementations.

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have been widely applied to capture many real-world applications. However, existing theoretical results have shown that learning in general POMDPs could be intractable, where the main challenge lies in the lack of latent state information. A key fundamental question here is how much online state information (OSI) is sufficient to achieve tractability. In this paper, we establish a lower bound that reveals a surprising hardness result: unless we have full OSI, we need an exponentially scaling sample complexity to obtain an $\epsilon$-optimal policy solution for POMDPs. Nonetheless, inspired by the key insights in our lower bound design, we find that there exist important tractable classes of POMDPs even with only partial OSI. In particular, for two novel classes of POMDPs with partial OSI, we provide new algorithms that are proved to be near-optimal by establishing new regret upper and lower bounds.

This work analyzes Graph Neural Networks, a generalization of Fully-Connected Deep Neural Nets on Graph structured data, when their width, that is the number of nodes in each fullyconnected layer is increasing to infinity. Infinite Width Neural Networks are connecting Deep Learning to Gaussian Processes and Kernels, both Machine Learning Frameworks with long traditions and extensive theoretical foundations. Gaussian Processes and Kernels have much less hyperparameters then Neural Networks and can be used for uncertainty estimation, making them more user friendly for applications. This works extends the increasing amount of research connecting Gaussian Processes and Kernels to Neural Networks. The Kernel and Gaussian Process closed forms are derived for a variety of architectures, namely the standard Graph Neural Network, the Graph Neural Network with Skip-Concatenate Connections and the Graph Attention Neural Network. All architectures are evaluated on a variety of datasets on the task of transductive Node Regression and Classification. Additionally, a Spectral Sparsification method known as Effective Resistance is used to improve runtime and memory requirements. Extending the setting to inductive graph learning tasks (Graph Regression/ Classification) is straightforward and is briefly discussed in 3.5.

In his breakthrough paper, Raz showed that any parity learning algorithm requires either quadratic memory or an exponential number of samples [FOCS'16, JACM'19]. A line of work that followed extended this result to a large class of learning problems. Until recently, all these results considered learning in the streaming model, where each sample is drawn independently, and the learner is allowed a single pass over the stream of samples. Garg, Raz, and Tal [CCC'19] considered a stronger model, allowing multiple passes over the stream. In the $2$-pass model, they showed that learning parities of size $n$ requires either a memory of size $n^{1.5}$ or at least $2^{\sqrt{n}}$ samples. (Their result also generalizes to other learning problems.) In this work, for any constant $q$, we prove tight memory-sample lower bounds for any parity learning algorithm that makes $q$ passes over the stream of samples. We show that such a learner requires either $\Omega(n^{2})$ memory size or at least $2^{\Omega(n)}$ samples. Beyond establishing a tight lower bound, this is the first non-trivial lower bound for $q$-pass learning for any $q\ge 3$. Similar to prior work, our results extend to any learning problem with many nearly-orthogonal concepts. We complement the lower bound with an upper bound, showing that parity learning with $q$ passes can be done efficiently with $O(n^2/\log q)$ memory.

Secure inference of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) under RNS-CKKS involves polynomial approximation of unsupported non-linear activation functions. However, existing approaches have three main limitations: 1) Inflexibility: The polynomial approximation and associated homomorphic evaluation architecture are customized manually for each CNN architecture and do not generalize to other networks. 2) Suboptimal Approximation: Each activation function is approximated instead of the function represented by the CNN. 3) Restricted Design: Either high-degree or low-degree polynomial approximations are used. The former retains high accuracy but slows down inference due to bootstrapping operations, while the latter accelerates ciphertext inference but compromises accuracy. To address these limitations, we present AutoFHE, which automatically adapts standard CNNs for secure inference under RNS-CKKS. The key idea is to adopt layerwise mixed-degree polynomial activation functions, which are optimized jointly with the homomorphic evaluation architecture in terms of the placement of bootstrapping operations. The problem is modeled within a multi-objective optimization framework to maximize accuracy and minimize the number of bootstrapping operations. AutoFHE can be applied flexibly on any CNN architecture, and it provides diverse solutions that span the trade-off between accuracy and latency. Experimental evaluation over RNS-CKKS encrypted CIFAR datasets shows that AutoFHE accelerates secure inference by $1.32\times$ to $1.8\times$ compared to methods employing high-degree polynomials. It also improves accuracy by up to 2.56% compared to methods using low-degree polynomials. Lastly, AutoFHE accelerates inference and improves accuracy by $103\times$ and 3.46%, respectively, compared to CNNs under TFHE.

Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is: exploiting the current knowledge of the environment to maximize the cumulative reward as well as exploring actions that allow improving the knowledge of the environment, hopefully leading to higher reward values (exploration-exploitation trade-off). Concurrently, another relevant issue regards the full observability of the states, which may not be assumed in all applications. Such as when only 2D images are considered as input in a RL approach used for finding the optimal action within a 3D simulation environment. In this work, we address these issues by deploying and testing several techniques to balance exploration and exploitation trade-off on partially observable systems for predicting steering wheels in autonomous driving scenario. More precisely, the final aim is to investigate the effects of using both stochastic and deterministic multi-armed bandit strategies coupled with a Deep Recurrent Q-Network. Additionally, we adapted and evaluated the impact of an innovative method to improve the learning phase of the underlying Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network. We aim to show that adaptive stochastic methods for exploration better approximate the trade-off between exploration and exploitation as, in general, Softmax and Max-Boltzmann strategies are able to outperform epsilon-greedy techniques.

Future sequence represents the outcome after executing the action into the environment. When driven by the information-theoretic concept of mutual information, it seeks maximally informative consequences. Explicit outcomes may vary across state, return, or trajectory serving different purposes such as credit assignment or imitation learning. However, the inherent nature of incorporating intrinsic motivation with reward maximization is often neglected. In this work, we propose a variational approach to jointly learn the necessary quantity for estimating the mutual information and the dynamics model, providing a general framework for incorporating different forms of outcomes of interest. Integrated into a policy iteration scheme, our approach guarantees convergence to the optimal policy. While we mainly focus on theoretical analysis, our approach opens the possibilities of leveraging intrinsic control with model learning to enhance sample efficiency and incorporate uncertainty of the environment into decision-making.

Diffusion models suffer from slow sample generation at inference time. Therefore, developing a principled framework for fast deterministic/stochastic sampling for a broader class of diffusion models is a promising direction. We propose two complementary frameworks for accelerating sample generation in pre-trained models: Conjugate Integrators and Splitting Integrators. Conjugate integrators generalize DDIM, mapping the reverse diffusion dynamics to a more amenable space for sampling. In contrast, splitting-based integrators, commonly used in molecular dynamics, reduce the numerical simulation error by cleverly alternating between numerical updates involving the data and auxiliary variables. After extensively studying these methods empirically and theoretically, we present a hybrid method that leads to the best-reported performance for diffusion models in augmented spaces. Applied to Phase Space Langevin Diffusion [Pandey & Mandt, 2023] on CIFAR-10, our deterministic and stochastic samplers achieve FID scores of 2.11 and 2.36 in only 100 network function evaluations (NFE) as compared to 2.57 and 2.63 for the best-performing baselines, respectively. Our code and model checkpoints will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/mandt-lab/PSLD}.

In this paper, we investigate the practical relevance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) with a special focus on the producing industries and relate them to the current state of academic XAI research. Our findings are based on an extensive series of interviews regarding the role and applicability of XAI along the Machine Learning (ML) lifecycle in current industrial practice and its expected relevance in the future. The interviews were conducted among a great variety of roles and key stakeholders from different industry sectors. On top of that, we outline the state of XAI research by providing a concise review of the relevant literature. This enables us to provide an encompassing overview covering the opinions of the surveyed persons as well as the current state of academic research. By comparing our interview results with the current research approaches we reveal several discrepancies. While a multitude of different XAI approaches exists, most of them are centered around the model evaluation phase and data scientists. Their versatile capabilities for other stages are currently either not sufficiently explored or not popular among practitioners. In line with existing work, our findings also confirm that more efforts are needed to enable also non-expert users' interpretation and understanding of opaque AI models with existing methods and frameworks.

Seeing-eye robots are very useful tools for guiding visually impaired people, potentially producing a huge societal impact given the low availability and high cost of real guide dogs. Although a few seeing-eye robot systems have already been demonstrated, none considered external tugs from humans, which frequently occur in a real guide dog setting. In this paper, we simultaneously train a locomotion controller that is robust to external tugging forces via Reinforcement Learning (RL), and an external force estimator via supervised learning. The controller ensures stable walking, and the force estimator enables the robot to respond to the external forces from the human. These forces are used to guide the robot to the global goal, which is unknown to the robot, while the robot guides the human around nearby obstacles via a local planner. Experimental results in simulation and on hardware show that our controller is robust to external forces, and our seeing-eye system can accurately detect force direction. We demonstrate our full seeing-eye robot system on a real quadruped robot with a blindfolded human. The video can be seen at our project page: https://bu-air-lab.github.io/guide_dog/

In this work, we leverage pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance time-series forecasting. Mirroring the growing interest in unifying models for Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, we envision creating an analogous model for long-term time-series forecasting. Due to limited large-scale time-series data for building robust foundation models, our approach LLM4TS focuses on leveraging the strengths of pre-trained LLMs. By combining time-series patching with temporal encoding, we have enhanced the capability of LLMs to handle time-series data effectively. Inspired by the supervised fine-tuning in chatbot domains, we prioritize a two-stage fine-tuning process: first conducting supervised fine-tuning to orient the LLM towards time-series data, followed by task-specific downstream fine-tuning. Furthermore, to unlock the flexibility of pre-trained LLMs without extensive parameter adjustments, we adopt several Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques. Drawing on these innovations, LLM4TS has yielded state-of-the-art results in long-term forecasting. Our model has also shown exceptional capabilities as both a robust representation learner and an effective few-shot learner, thanks to the knowledge transferred from the pre-trained LLM.

Different conflicting optimization criteria arise naturally in various Deep Learning scenarios. These can address different main tasks (i.e., in the setting of Multi-Task Learning), but also main and secondary tasks such as loss minimization versus sparsity. The usual approach is a simple weighting of the criteria, which formally only works in the convex setting. In this paper, we present a Multi-Objective Optimization algorithm using a modified Weighted Chebyshev scalarization for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with respect to several tasks. By employing this scalarization technique, the algorithm can identify all optimal solutions of the original problem while reducing its complexity to a sequence of single-objective problems. The simplified problems are then solved using an Augmented Lagrangian method, enabling the use of popular optimization techniques such as Adam and Stochastic Gradient Descent, while efficaciously handling constraints. Our work aims to address the (economical and also ecological) sustainability issue of DNN models, with a particular focus on Deep Multi-Task models, which are typically designed with a very large number of weights to perform equally well on multiple tasks. Through experiments conducted on two Machine Learning datasets, we demonstrate the possibility of adaptively sparsifying the model during training without significantly impacting its performance, if we are willing to apply task-specific adaptations to the network weights. Code is available at https://github.com/salomonhotegni/MDMTN.

In continual learning, the learner learns multiple tasks in sequence, with data being acquired only once for each task. Catastrophic forgetting is a major challenge to continual learning. To reduce forgetting, some existing rehearsal-based methods use episodic memory to replay samples of previous tasks. However, in the process of knowledge integration when learning a new task, this strategy also suffers from catastrophic forgetting due to an imbalance between old and new knowledge. To address this problem, we propose a novel replay strategy called Manifold Expansion Replay (MaER). We argue that expanding the implicit manifold of the knowledge representation in the episodic memory helps to improve the robustness and expressiveness of the model. To this end, we propose a greedy strategy to keep increasing the diameter of the implicit manifold represented by the knowledge in the buffer during memory management. In addition, we introduce Wasserstein distance instead of cross entropy as distillation loss to preserve previous knowledge. With extensive experimental validation on MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and TinyImageNet, we show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy in continual learning setup, outperforming the state of the arts.

To solve complex tasks, large language models (LLMs) often require multiple rounds of interactions with the user, sometimes assisted by external tools. However, current evaluation protocols often emphasize benchmark performance with single-turn exchanges, neglecting the nuanced interactions among the user, LLMs, and external tools, while also underestimating the importance of natural language feedback from users. These oversights contribute to discrepancies between research benchmark evaluations and real-world use cases. We introduce MINT, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs' ability to solve tasks with multi-turn interactions by (1) using tools and (2) leveraging natural language feedback. To ensure reproducibility, we provide an evaluation framework where LLMs can access tools by executing Python code and receive users' natural language feedback simulated by GPT-4. We repurpose a diverse set of established evaluation datasets focusing on reasoning, coding, and decision-making and carefully curate them into a compact subset for efficient evaluation. Our analysis of 20 open- and closed-source LLMs offers intriguing findings. (a) LLMs generally benefit from tools and language feedback, with performance gains (absolute, same below) of 1-8% for each turn of tool use and 2-17% with natural language feedback. (b) Better single-turn performance does not guarantee better multi-turn performance. (c) Surprisingly, on the LLMs evaluated, supervised instruction-finetuning (SIFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) generally hurt multi-turn capabilities. We expect MINT can help measure progress and incentivize research in improving LLMs' capabilities in multi-turn interactions, especially for open-source communities where multi-turn human evaluation can be less accessible compared to commercial LLMs with a larger user base.

Exploring variations of 3D shapes is a time-consuming process in traditional 3D modeling tools. Deep generative models of 3D shapes often feature continuous latent spaces that can, in principle, be used to explore potential variations starting from a set of input shapes. In practice, doing so can be problematic: latent spaces are high dimensional and hard to visualize, contain shapes that are not relevant to the input shapes, and linear paths through them often lead to sub-optimal shape transitions. Furthermore, one would ideally be able to explore variations in the original high-quality meshes used to train the generative model, not its lower-quality output geometry. In this paper, we present a method to explore variations among a given set of landmark shapes by constructing a mapping from an easily-navigable 2D exploration space to a subspace of a pre-trained generative model. We first describe how to find a mapping that spans the set of input landmark shapes and exhibits smooth variations between them. We then show how to turn the variations in this subspace into deformation fields, to transfer those variations to high-quality meshes for the landmark shapes. Our results show that our method can produce visually-pleasing and easily-navigable 2D exploration spaces for several different shape categories, especially as compared to prior work on learning deformation spaces for 3D shapes.

Learning transparent, interpretable controllers with offline data in decision-making systems is an essential area of research due to its potential to reduce the risk of applications in real-world systems. However, in responsibility-sensitive settings such as healthcare, decision accountability is of paramount importance, yet has not been adequately addressed by the literature. This paper introduces the Accountable Offline Controller (AOC) that employs the offline dataset as the Decision Corpus and performs accountable control based on a tailored selection of examples, referred to as the Corpus Subset. ABC operates effectively in low-data scenarios, can be extended to the strictly offline imitation setting, and displays qualities of both conservation and adaptability. We assess ABC's performance in both simulated and real-world healthcare scenarios, emphasizing its capability to manage offline control tasks with high levels of performance while maintaining accountability. Keywords: Interpretable Reinforcement Learning, Explainable Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning Transparency, Offline Reinforcement Learning, Batched Control.

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have demonstrated exceptional synthesis outcomes across various tasks. However, the current design landscape of the forward diffusion process remains largely untapped and often relies on physical heuristics or simplifying assumptions. Utilizing insights from the development of scalable Bayesian posterior samplers, we present a complete recipe for formulating forward processes in SGMs, ensuring convergence to the desired target distribution. Our approach reveals that several existing SGMs can be seen as specific manifestations of our framework. Building upon this method, we introduce Phase Space Langevin Diffusion (PSLD), which relies on score-based modeling within an augmented space enriched by auxiliary variables akin to physical phase space. Empirical results exhibit the superior sample quality and improved speed-quality trade-off of PSLD compared to various competing approaches on established image synthesis benchmarks. Remarkably, PSLD achieves sample quality akin to state-of-the-art SGMs (FID: 2.10 for unconditional CIFAR-10 generation). Lastly, we demonstrate the applicability of PSLD in conditional synthesis using pre-trained score networks, offering an appealing alternative as an SGM backbone for future advancements. Code and model checkpoints can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/mandt-lab/PSLD}.

Large language models (LLMs) aligned to human preferences via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) underpin many commercial applications. However, how RLHF impacts LLM internals remains opaque. We propose a novel method to interpret learned reward functions in RLHF-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders. Our approach trains autoencoder sets on activations from a base LLM and its RLHF-tuned version. By comparing autoencoder hidden spaces, we identify unique features that reflect the accuracy of the learned reward model. To quantify this, we construct a scenario where the tuned LLM learns token-reward mappings to maximize reward. This is the first application of sparse autoencoders for interpreting learned rewards and broadly inspecting reward learning in LLMs. Our method provides an abstract approximation of reward integrity. This presents a promising technique for ensuring alignment between specified objectives and model behaviors.

Recent developments in offline reinforcement learning have uncovered the immense potential of diffusion modeling, which excels at representing heterogeneous behavior policies. However, sampling from diffusion policies is considerably slow because it necessitates tens to hundreds of iterative inference steps for one action. To address this issue, we propose to extract an efficient deterministic inference policy from critic models and pretrained diffusion behavior models, leveraging the latter to directly regularize the policy gradient with the behavior distribution's score function during optimization. Our method enjoys powerful generative capabilities of diffusion modeling while completely circumventing the computationally intensive and time-consuming diffusion sampling scheme, both during training and evaluation. Extensive results on D4RL tasks show that our method boosts action sampling speed by more than 25 times compared with various leading diffusion-based methods in locomotion tasks, while still maintaining state-of-the-art performance.

Most bandit algorithms assume that the reward variances or their upper bounds are known, and that they are the same for all arms. This naturally leads to suboptimal performance and higher regret due to variance overestimation. On the other hand, underestimated reward variances may lead to linear regret due to committing early to a suboptimal arm. This motivated prior works on variance-adaptive frequentist algorithms, which have strong instance-dependent regret bounds but cannot incorporate prior knowledge on reward variances. We lay foundations for the Bayesian setting, which incorporates prior knowledge. This results in lower regret in practice, due to using the prior in the algorithm design, and also improved regret guarantees. Specifically, we study Gaussian bandits with {unknown heterogeneous reward variances}, and develop a Thompson sampling algorithm with prior-dependent Bayes regret bounds. We achieve lower regret with lower reward variances and more informative priors on them, which is precisely why we pay only for what is uncertain. This is the first result of its kind. Finally, we corroborate our theory with extensive experiments, which show the superiority of our variance-adaptive Bayesian algorithm over prior frequentist approaches. We also show that our approach is robust to model misspecification and can be applied with estimated priors.

Adversarial attacks can affect the object recognition capabilities of machines in wild. These can often result from spurious correlations between input and class labels, and are prone to memorization in large networks. While networks are expected to do automated feature selection, it is not effective at the scale of the object. Humans, however, are able to select the minimum set of features required to form a robust representation of an object. In this work, we show that finetuning any pretrained off-the-shelf network with Extreme Image Transformations (EIT) not only helps in learning a robust latent representation, it also improves the performance of these networks against common adversarial attacks of various intensities. Our EIT trained networks show strong activations in the object regions even when tested with more intense noise, showing promising generalizations across different kinds of adversarial attacks.

By circumventing the resolution limitations of optics, coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) and ptychography are making their way into scientific fields ranging from X-ray imaging to astronomy. Yet, the need for time consuming iterative phase recovery hampers real-time imaging. While supervised deep learning strategies have increased reconstruction speed, they sacrifice image quality. Furthermore, these methods' demand for extensive labeled training data is experimentally burdensome. Here, we propose an unsupervised physics-informed neural network reconstruction method, PtychoPINN, that retains the factor of 100-to-1000 speedup of deep learning-based reconstruction while improving reconstruction quality by combining the diffraction forward map with real-space constraints from overlapping measurements. In particular, PtychoPINN significantly advances generalizability, accuracy (with a typical 10 dB PSNR increase), and linear resolution (2- to 6-fold gain). This blend of performance and speed offers exciting prospects for high-resolution real-time imaging in high-throughput environments such as X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) and diffraction-limited light sources.

Machine unlearning, the study of efficiently removing the impact of specific training points on the trained model, has garnered increased attention of late, driven by the need to comply with privacy regulations like the Right to be Forgotten. Although unlearning is particularly relevant for LLMs in light of the copyright issues they raise, achieving precise unlearning is computationally infeasible for very large models. To this end, recent work has proposed several algorithms which approximate the removal of training data without retraining the model. These algorithms crucially rely on access to the model parameters in order to update them, an assumption that may not hold in practice due to computational constraints or when the LLM is accessed via API. In this work, we propose a new class of unlearning methods for LLMs we call ''In-Context Unlearning'', providing inputs in context and without having to update model parameters. To unlearn a particular training instance, we provide the instance alongside a flipped label and additional correctly labelled instances which are prepended as inputs to the LLM at inference time. Our experimental results demonstrate that these contexts effectively remove specific information from the training set while maintaining performance levels that are competitive with (or in some cases exceed) state-of-the-art unlearning methods that require access to the LLM parameters.

We present a lifelong audio-video masked autoencoder that continually learns the multimodal representations from a video stream containing audio-video pairs, while its distribution continually shifts over time. Specifically, we propose two novel ideas to tackle the problem: (1) Localized Alignment: We introduce a small trainable multimodal encoder that predicts the audio and video tokens that are well-aligned with each other. This allows the model to learn only the highly correlated audiovisual patches with accurate multimodal relationships. (2) Forget-robust multimodal patch selection: We compare the relative importance of each audio-video patch between the current and past data pair to mitigate unintended drift of the previously learned audio-video representations. Our proposed method, FLAVA (Forget-robust Localized Audio-Video Alignment), therefore, captures the complex relationships between the audio and video modalities during training on a sequence of pre-training tasks while alleviating the forgetting of learned audiovisual correlations. Our experiments validate that FLAVA outperforms the state-of-the-art continual learning methods on several benchmark datasets under continual audio-video representation learning scenarios.

Large language models (LLMs) often make factually incorrect responses despite their success in various applications. In this paper, we hypothesize that relying heavily on simple co-occurrence statistics of the pre-training corpora is one of the main factors that cause factual errors. Our results reveal that LLMs are vulnerable to the co-occurrence bias, defined as preferring frequently co-occurred words over the correct answer. Consequently, LLMs struggle to recall facts whose subject and object rarely co-occur in the pre-training dataset although they are seen during finetuning. We show that co-occurrence bias remains despite scaling up model sizes or finetuning. Therefore, we suggest finetuning on a debiased dataset to mitigate the bias by filtering out biased samples whose subject-object co-occurrence count is high. Although debiased finetuning allows LLMs to memorize rare facts in the training set, it is not effective in recalling rare facts unseen during finetuning. Further research in mitigation will help build reliable language models by preventing potential errors. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/CheongWoong/impact_of_cooccurrence}.

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze seven such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.

Larger and deeper networks generalise well despite their increased capacity to overfit. Understanding why this happens is theoretically and practically important. One recent approach looks at the infinitely wide limits of such networks and their corresponding kernels. However, these theoretical tools cannot fully explain finite networks as the empirical kernel changes significantly during gradient-descent-based training in contrast to infinite networks. In this work, we derive an iterative linearised training method as a novel empirical tool to further investigate this distinction, allowing us to control for sparse (i.e. infrequent) feature updates and quantify the frequency of feature learning needed to achieve comparable performance. We justify iterative linearisation as an interpolation between a finite analog of the infinite width regime, which does not learn features, and standard gradient descent training, which does. Informally, we also show that it is analogous to a damped version of the Gauss-Newton algorithm -- a second-order method. We show that in a variety of cases, iterative linearised training surprisingly performs on par with standard training, noting in particular how much less frequent feature learning is required to achieve comparable performance. We also show that feature learning is essential for good performance. Since such feature learning inevitably causes changes in the NTK kernel, we provide direct negative evidence for the NTK theory, which states the NTK kernel remains constant during training.

In many cases, a machine learning model must learn to correctly predict a few data points with particular values of interest in a broader range of data where many target values are zero. Zero-inflated data can be found in diverse scenarios, such as lumpy and intermittent demands, power consumption for home appliances being turned on and off, impurities measurement in distillation processes, and even airport shuttle demand prediction. The presence of zeroes affects the models' learning and may result in poor performance. Furthermore, zeroes also distort the metrics used to compute the model's prediction quality. This paper showcases two real-world use cases (home appliances classification and airport shuttle demand prediction) where a hierarchical model applied in the context of zero-inflated data leads to excellent results. In particular, for home appliances classification, the weighted average of Precision, Recall, F1, and AUC ROC was increased by 27%, 34%, 49%, and 27%, respectively. Furthermore, it is estimated that the proposed approach is also four times more energy efficient than the SOTA approach against which it was compared to. Two-fold models performed best in all cases when predicting airport shuttle demand, and the difference against other models has been proven to be statistically significant.  ( 2 min )

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a widely used tool to extract text from scanned documents. Today, the state-of-the-art is achieved by exploiting deep neural networks. However, the cost of this performance is paid at the price of system vulnerability. For instance, in backdoor attacks, attackers compromise the training phase by inserting a backdoor in the victim's model that will be activated at testing time by specific patterns while leaving the overall model performance intact. This work proposes a backdoor attack for OCR resulting in the injection of non-readable characters from malicious input images. This simple but effective attack exposes the state-of-the-art OCR weakness, making the extracted text correct to human eyes but simultaneously unusable for the NLP application that uses OCR as a preprocessing step. Experimental results show that the attacked models successfully output non-readable characters for around 90% of the poisoned instances without harming their performance for the remaining instances.

We develop a novel framework that adds the regularizers of the sparse group lasso to a family of adaptive optimizers in deep learning, such as Momentum, Adagrad, Adam, AMSGrad, AdaHessian, and create a new class of optimizers, which are named Group Momentum, Group Adagrad, Group Adam, Group AMSGrad and Group AdaHessian, etc., accordingly. We establish theoretically proven convergence guarantees in the stochastic convex settings, based on primal-dual methods. We evaluate the regularized effect of our new optimizers on three large-scale real-world ad click datasets with state-of-the-art deep learning models. The experimental results reveal that compared with the original optimizers with the post-processing procedure which uses the magnitude pruning method, the performance of the models can be significantly improved on the same sparsity level. Furthermore, in comparison to the cases without magnitude pruning, our methods can achieve extremely high sparsity with significantly better or highly competitive performance. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-machine-learning/dlrover/blob/master/tfplus.  ( 3 min )

It is often advantageous to train models on a subset of the available train examples, because the examples are of variable quality or because one would like to train with fewer examples, without sacrificing performance. We present Gradient Information Optimization (GIO), a scalable, task-agnostic approach to this data selection problem that requires only a small set of (unlabeled) examples representing a target distribution. GIO begins from a natural, information-theoretic objective that is intractable in practice. Our contribution is in showing that it can be made highly scalable through a simple relaxation of the objective and a highly efficient implementation. In experiments with machine translation, spelling correction, and image recognition, we show that GIO delivers outstanding results with very small train sets. These findings are robust to different representation models and hyperparameters for GIO itself. GIO is task- and domain-agnostic and can be applied out-of-the-box to new datasets and domains.

Feature learning is thought to be one of the fundamental reasons for the success of deep neural networks. It is rigorously known that in two-layer fully-connected neural networks under certain conditions, one step of gradient descent on the first layer followed by ridge regression on the second layer can lead to feature learning; characterized by the appearance of a separated rank-one component -- spike -- in the spectrum of the feature matrix. However, with a constant gradient descent step size, this spike only carries information from the linear component of the target function and therefore learning non-linear components is impossible. We show that with a learning rate that grows with the sample size, such training in fact introduces multiple rank-one components, each corresponding to a specific polynomial feature. We further prove that the limiting large-dimensional and large sample training and test errors of the updated neural networks are fully characterized by these spikes. By precisely analyzing the improvement in the loss, we demonstrate that these non-linear features can enhance learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in NLP, but their demands hinder their widespread deployment. While Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) offers a solution, its extensive training costs make Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) a more practical approach for LLMs. In existing studies, activation outliers in particular channels are identified as the bottleneck to PTQ accuracy. They propose to transform the magnitudes from activations to weights, which however offers limited alleviation or suffers from unstable gradients, resulting in a severe performance drop at low-bitwidth. In this paper, we propose QLLM, an accurate and efficient low-bitwidth PTQ method designed for LLMs. QLLM introduces an adaptive channel reassembly technique that reallocates the magnitude of outliers to other channels, thereby mitigating their impact on the quantization range. This is achieved by channel disassembly and channel assembly, which first breaks down the outlier channels into several sub-channels to ensure a more balanced distribution of activation magnitudes. Then similar channels are merged to maintain the original channel number for efficiency. Additionally, an adaptive strategy is designed to autonomously determine the optimal number of sub-channels for channel disassembly. To further compensate for the performance loss caused by quantization, we propose an efficient tuning method that only learns a small number of low-rank weights while freezing the pre-trained quantized model. After training, these low-rank parameters can be fused into the frozen weights without affecting inference. Extensive experiments on LLaMA-1 and LLaMA-2 show that QLLM can obtain accurate quantized models efficiently. For example, QLLM quantizes the 4-bit LLaMA-2-70B within 10 hours on a single A100-80G GPU, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art method by 7.89% on the average accuracy across five zero-shot tasks.  ( 3 min )

Continual learning (CL) has remained a persistent challenge for deep neural networks due to catastrophic forgetting (CF) of previously learned tasks. Several techniques such as weight regularization, experience rehearsal, and parameter isolation have been proposed to alleviate CF. Despite their relative success, these research directions have predominantly remained orthogonal and suffer from several shortcomings, while missing out on the advantages of competing strategies. On the contrary, the brain continually learns, accommodates, and transfers knowledge across tasks by simultaneously leveraging several neurophysiological processes, including neurogenesis, active forgetting, neuromodulation, metaplasticity, experience rehearsal, and context-dependent gating, rarely resulting in CF. Inspired by how the brain exploits multiple mechanisms concurrently, we propose TriRE, a novel CL paradigm that encompasses retaining the most prominent neurons for each task, revising and solidifying the extracted knowledge of current and past tasks, and actively promoting less active neurons for subsequent tasks through rewinding and relearning. Across CL settings, TriRE significantly reduces task interference and surpasses different CL approaches considered in isolation.  ( 2 min )

Evaluating the adversarial robustness of machine learning models using gradient-based attacks is challenging. In this work, we show that hyperparameter optimization can improve fast minimum-norm attacks by automating the selection of the loss function, the optimizer and the step-size scheduler, along with the corresponding hyperparameters. Our extensive evaluation involving several robust models demonstrates the improved efficacy of fast minimum-norm attacks when hyper-up with hyperparameter optimization. We release our open-source code at https://github.com/pralab/HO-FMN.  ( 2 min )

Graph property prediction tasks are important and numerous. While each task offers a small size of labeled examples, unlabeled graphs have been collected from various sources and at a large scale. A conventional approach is training a model with the unlabeled graphs on self-supervised tasks and then fine-tuning the model on the prediction tasks. However, the self-supervised task knowledge could not be aligned or sometimes conflicted with what the predictions needed. In this paper, we propose to extract the knowledge underlying the large set of unlabeled graphs as a specific set of useful data points to augment each property prediction model. We use a diffusion model to fully utilize the unlabeled graphs and design two new objectives to guide the model's denoising process with each task's labeled data to generate task-specific graph examples and their labels. Experiments demonstrate that our data-centric approach performs significantly better than fifteen existing various methods on fifteen tasks. The performance improvement brought by unlabeled data is visible as the generated labeled examples unlike the self-supervised learning.  ( 2 min )

Many real-world prediction tasks have outcome variables that have characteristic heavy-tail distributions. Examples include copies of books sold, auction prices of art pieces, demand for commodities in warehouses, etc. By learning heavy-tailed distributions, "big and rare" instances (e.g., the best-sellers) will have accurate predictions. Most existing approaches are not dedicated to learning heavy-tailed distribution; thus, they heavily under-predict such instances. To tackle this problem, we introduce Learning to Place (L2P), which exploits the pairwise relationships between instances for learning. In its training phase, L2P learns a pairwise preference classifier: is instance A > instance B? In its placing phase, L2P obtains a prediction by placing the new instance among the known instances. Based on its placement, the new instance is then assigned a value for its outcome variable. Experiments on real data show that L2P outperforms competing approaches in terms of accuracy and ability to reproduce heavy-tailed outcome distribution. In addition, L2P provides an interpretable model by placing each predicted instance in relation to its comparable neighbors. Interpretable models are highly desirable when lives and treasure are at stake.

Predicting the docking between proteins and ligands is a crucial and challenging task for drug discovery. However, traditional docking methods mainly rely on scoring functions, and deep learning-based docking approaches usually neglect the 3D spatial information of proteins and ligands, as well as the graph-level features of ligands, which limits their performance. To address these limitations, we propose an equivariant transformer neural network for protein-ligand docking pose prediction. Our approach involves the fusion of ligand graph-level features by feature processing, followed by the learning of ligand and protein representations using our proposed TAMformer module. Additionally, we employ an iterative optimization approach based on the predicted distance matrix to generate refined ligand poses. The experimental results on real datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance.  ( 2 min )

Aiming to build foundation models for time-series forecasting and study their scaling behavior, we present here our work-in-progress on Lag-Llama, a general-purpose univariate probabilistic time-series forecasting model trained on a large collection of time-series data. The model shows good zero-shot prediction capabilities on unseen "out-of-distribution" time-series datasets, outperforming supervised baselines. We use smoothly broken power-laws to fit and predict model scaling behavior. The open source code is made available at https://github.com/kashif/pytorch-transformer-ts.

Industrial systems such as recommender systems and online advertising, have been widely equipped with multi-stage architectures, which are divided into several cascaded modules, including matching, pre-ranking, ranking and re-ranking. As a critical bridge between matching and ranking, existing pre-ranking approaches mainly endure sample selection bias (SSB) problem owing to ignoring the entire-chain data dependence, resulting in sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we rethink pre-ranking system from the perspective of the entire sample space, and propose Entire-chain Cross-domain Models (ECM), which leverage samples from the whole cascaded stages to effectively alleviate SSB problem. Besides, we design a fine-grained neural structure named ECMM to further improve the pre-ranking accuracy. Specifically, we propose a cross-domain multi-tower neural network to comprehensively predict for each stage result, and introduce the sub-networking routing strategy with $L0$ regularization to reduce computational costs. Evaluations on real-world large-scale traffic logs demonstrate that our pre-ranking models outperform SOTA methods while time consumption is maintained within an acceptable level, which achieves better trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness.

Building agents based on tree-search planning capabilities with learned models has achieved remarkable success in classic decision-making problems, such as Go and Atari. However, it has been deemed challenging or even infeasible to extend Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based algorithms to diverse real-world applications, especially when these environments involve complex action spaces and significant simulation costs, or inherent stochasticity. In this work, we introduce LightZero, the first unified benchmark for deploying MCTS/MuZero in general sequential decision scenarios. Specificially, we summarize the most critical challenges in designing a general MCTS-style decision-making solver, then decompose the tightly-coupled algorithm and system design of tree-search RL methods into distinct sub-modules. By incorporating more appropriate exploration and optimization strategies, we can significantly enhance these sub-modules and construct powerful LightZero agents to tackle tasks across a wide range of domains, such as board games, Atari, MuJoCo, MiniGrid and GoBigger. Detailed benchmark results reveal the significant potential of such methods in building scalable and efficient decision intelligence. The code is available as part of OpenDILab at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.  ( 2 min )

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) aim to identify specific data samples within the private training dataset of machine learning models, leading to serious privacy violations and other sophisticated threats. Many practical black-box MIAs require query access to the data distribution (the same distribution where the private data is drawn) to train shadow models. By doing so, the adversary obtains models trained "with" or "without" samples drawn from the distribution, and analyzes the characteristics of the samples under consideration. The adversary is often required to train more than hundreds of shadow models to extract the signals needed for MIAs; this becomes the computational overhead of MIAs. In this paper, we propose that by strategically choosing the samples, MI adversaries can maximize their attack success while minimizing the number of shadow models. First, our motivational experiments suggest memorization as the key property explaining disparate sample vulnerability to MIAs. We formalize this through a theoretical bound that connects MI advantage with memorization. Second, we show sample complexity bounds that connect the number of shadow models needed for MIAs with memorization. Lastly, we confirm our theoretical arguments with comprehensive experiments; by utilizing samples with high memorization scores, the adversary can (a) significantly improve its efficacy regardless of the MIA used, and (b) reduce the number of shadow models by nearly two orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art approaches.  ( 2 min )

Although Maxwell discovered the physical laws of electromagnetic waves 160 years ago, how to precisely model the propagation of an RF signal in an electrically large and complex environment remains a long-standing problem. The difficulty is in the complex interactions between the RF signal and the obstacles (e.g., reflection, diffraction, etc.). Inspired by the great success of using a neural network to describe the optical field in computer vision, we propose a neural radio-frequency radiance field, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$, which represents a continuous volumetric scene function that makes sense of an RF signal's propagation. Particularly, after training with a few signal measurements, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ can tell how/what signal is received at any position when it knows the position of a transmitter. As a physical-layer neural network, NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ can take advantage of the learned statistic model plus the physical model of ray tracing to generate a synthetic dataset that meets the training demands of application-layer artificial neural networks (ANNs). Thus, we can boost the performance of ANNs by the proposed turbo-learning, which mixes the true and synthetic datasets to intensify the training. Our experiment results show that turbo-learning can enhance performance with an approximate 50% increase. We also demonstrate the power of NeRF$^\textbf{2}$ in the field of indoor localization and 5G MIMO.

Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods for sampling from complex distributions and estimating normalization constants often simulate samples from a sequence of intermediate distributions along an annealing path, which bridges between a tractable initial distribution and a target density of interest. Prior work has constructed annealing paths using quasi-arithmetic means, and interpreted the resulting intermediate densities as minimizing an expected divergence to the endpoints. We provide a comprehensive analysis of this 'centroid' property using Bregman divergences under a monotonic embedding of the density function, thereby associating common divergences such as Amari's and Renyi's ${\alpha}$-divergences, ${(\alpha,\beta)}$-divergences, and the Jensen-Shannon divergence with intermediate densities along an annealing path. Our analysis highlights the interplay between parametric families, quasi-arithmetic means, and divergence functions using the rho-tau Bregman divergence framework of Zhang 2004,2013.

Practical real world datasets with plentiful categories introduce new challenges for unsupervised domain adaptation like small inter-class discriminability, that existing approaches relying on domain invariance alone cannot handle sufficiently well. In this work we propose MemSAC, which exploits sample level similarity across source and target domains to achieve discriminative transfer, along with architectures that scale to a large number of categories. For this purpose, we first introduce a memory augmented approach to efficiently extract pairwise similarity relations between labeled source and unlabeled target domain instances, suited to handle an arbitrary number of classes. Next, we propose and theoretically justify a novel variant of the contrastive loss to promote local consistency among within-class cross domain samples while enforcing separation between classes, thus preserving discriminative transfer from source to target. We validate the advantages of MemSAC with significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art on multiple challenging transfer tasks designed for large-scale adaptation, such as DomainNet with 345 classes and fine-grained adaptation on Caltech-UCSD birds dataset with 200 classes. We also provide in-depth analysis and insights into the effectiveness of MemSAC.

This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning multi-layer generator models. The multi-layer generator model builds multiple layers of latent variables as a prior model on top of the generator, which benefits learning complex data distribution and hierarchical representations. However, such a prior model usually focuses on modeling inter-layer relations between latent variables by assuming non-informative (conditional) Gaussian distributions, which can be limited in model expressivity. To tackle this issue and learn more expressive prior models, we propose an energy-based model (EBM) on the joint latent space over all layers of latent variables with the multi-layer generator as its backbone. Such joint latent space EBM prior model captures the intra-layer contextual relations at each layer through layer-wise energy terms, and latent variables across different layers are jointly corrected. We develop a joint training scheme via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which involves Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for both prior and posterior distributions of the latent variables from different layers. To ensure efficient inference and learning, we further propose a variational training scheme where an inference model is used to amortize the costly posterior MCMC sampling. Our experiments demonstrate that the learned model can be expressive in generating high-quality images and capturing hierarchical features for better outlier detection.  ( 2 min )

This paper presents a method to efficiently classify the gastroenterologic section of images derived from Video Capsule Endoscopy (VCE) studies by exploring the combination of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for classification with the time-series analysis properties of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). It is demonstrated that successive time-series analysis identifies and corrects errors in the CNN output. Our approach achieves an accuracy of $98.04\%$ on the Rhode Island (RI) Gastroenterology dataset. This allows for precise localization within the gastrointestinal (GI) tract while requiring only approximately 1M parameters and thus, provides a method suitable for low power devices  ( 2 min )

Machine learning models are often personalized with information that is protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. These models use information about people but do not facilitate nor inform their consent. Individuals cannot opt out of reporting personal information to a model, nor tell if they benefit from personalization in the first place. We introduce a family of classification models, called participatory systems, that let individuals opt into personalization at prediction time. We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for personalization with categorical group attributes. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of participatory systems in clinical prediction tasks, benchmarking them with common approaches for personalization and imputation. Our results demonstrate that participatory systems can facilitate and inform consent while improving performance and data use across all groups who report personal data.

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is a method to perform classification that uses binary vectors with high dimensions and the majority rule. This approach has the potential to be energy-efficient and hence deemed suitable for resource-limited platforms due to its simplicity and massive parallelism. However, in order to achieve high accuracy, HDC sometimes uses hypervectors with tens of thousands of dimensions. This potentially negates its efficiency advantage. In this paper, we examine the necessity of such high dimensions and conduct a detailed theoretical analysis of the relationship between hypervector dimensions and accuracy. Our results demonstrate that as the dimension of the hypervectors increases, the worst-case/average-case HDC prediction accuracy with the majority rule decreases. Building on this insight, we develop HDC models that use binary hypervectors with dimensions orders of magnitude lower than those of state-of-the-art HDC models while maintaining equivalent or even improved accuracy and efficiency. For instance, on the MNIST dataset, we achieve 91.12% HDC accuracy in image classification with a dimension of only 64. Our methods perform operations that are only 0.35% of other HDC models with dimensions of 10,000. Furthermore, we evaluate our methods on ISOLET, UCI-HAR, and Fashion-MNIST datasets and investigate the limits of HDC computing.  ( 2 min )

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has undergone transformative changes with the advent of deep learning methodologies. One challenge persistently confronting researchers is the scarcity of high-quality, annotated datasets that drive these models. This paper explores the nuances of synthetic data generation in NLP, with a focal point on template-based question generation. By assessing its advantages, including data augmentation potential and the introduction of structured variety, we juxtapose these benefits against inherent limitations, such as the risk of overfitting and the constraints posed by pre-defined templates. Drawing from empirical evaluations, we demonstrate the impact of template-based synthetic data on the performance of modern transformer models. We conclude by emphasizing the delicate balance required between synthetic and real-world data, and the future trajectories of integrating synthetic data in model training pipelines. The findings aim to guide NLP practitioners in harnessing synthetic data's potential, ensuring optimal model performance in diverse applications.  ( 2 min )

The classification of galaxy morphologies is an important step in the investigation of theories of hierarchical structure formation. While human expert visual classification remains quite effective and accurate, it cannot keep up with the massive influx of data from emerging sky surveys. A variety of approaches have been proposed to classify large numbers of galaxies; these approaches include crowdsourced visual classification, and automated and computational methods, such as machine learning methods based on designed morphology statistics and deep learning. In this work, we develop two novel galaxy morphology statistics, descent average and descent variance, which can be efficiently extracted from telescope galaxy images. We further propose simplified versions of the existing image statistics concentration, asymmetry, and clumpiness, which have been widely used in the literature of galaxy morphologies. We utilize the galaxy image data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to demonstrate the effective performance of our proposed image statistics at accurately detecting spiral and elliptical galaxies when used as features of a random forest classifier.  ( 2 min )

Multi-modal trajectory forecasting methods commonly evaluate using single-agent metrics (marginal metrics), such as minimum Average Displacement Error (ADE) and Final Displacement Error (FDE), which fail to capture joint performance of multiple interacting agents. Only focusing on marginal metrics can lead to unnatural predictions, such as colliding trajectories or diverging trajectories for people who are clearly walking together as a group. Consequently, methods optimized for marginal metrics lead to overly-optimistic estimations of performance, which is detrimental to progress in trajectory forecasting research. In response to the limitations of marginal metrics, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) trajectory forecasting methods with respect to multi-agent metrics (joint metrics): JADE, JFDE, and collision rate. We demonstrate the importance of joint metrics as opposed to marginal metrics with quantitative evidence and qualitative examples drawn from the ETH / UCY and Stanford Drone datasets. We introduce a new loss function incorporating joint metrics that, when applied to a SOTA trajectory forecasting method, achieves a 7\% improvement in JADE / JFDE on the ETH / UCY datasets with respect to the previous SOTA. Our results also indicate that optimizing for joint metrics naturally leads to an improvement in interaction modeling, as evidenced by a 16\% decrease in mean collision rate on the ETH / UCY datasets with respect to the previous SOTA. Code is available at \texttt{\hyperlink{https://github.com/ericaweng/joint-metrics-matter}{github.com/ericaweng/joint-metrics-matter}}.  ( 3 min )

Content Delivery Networks carry the majority of Internet traffic, and the increasing demand for video content as a major IP traffic across the Internet highlights the importance of caching and prefetching optimization algorithms. Prefetching aims to make data available in the cache before the requester places its request to reduce access time and improve the Quality of Experience on the user side. Prefetching is well investigated in operating systems, compiler instructions, in-memory cache, local storage systems, high-speed networks, and cloud systems. Traditional prefetching techniques are well adapted to a particular access pattern, but fail to adapt to sudden variations or randomization in workloads. This paper explores the use of reinforcement learning to tackle the changes in user access patterns and automatically adapt over time. To this end, we propose, DeePref, a Deep Reinforcement Learning agent for online video content prefetching in Content Delivery Networks. DeePref is a prefetcher implemented on edge networks and is agnostic to hardware design, operating systems, and applications. Our results show that DeePref DRQN, using a real-world dataset, achieves a 17% increase in prefetching accuracy and a 28% increase in prefetching coverage on average compared to baseline approaches that use video content popularity as a building block to statically or dynamically make prefetching decisions. We also study the possibility of transfer learning of statistical models from one edge network into another, where unseen user requests from unknown distribution are observed. In terms of transfer learning, the increase in prefetching accuracy and prefetching coverage are [$30%$, $10%$], respectively. Our source code will be available on Github.  ( 3 min )

Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the literature, they excessively explore due to a lack of prioritization for information of enduring value, or are designed in ways that do not scale in modern applications with high-dimensional user-specific features and large action set, or both. In this paper, we introduce a novel non-stationary contextual bandit algorithm that addresses these concerns. It combines a scalable, deep-neural-network-based architecture with a carefully designed exploration mechanism that strategically prioritizes collecting information with the most lasting value in a non-stationary environment. Through empirical evaluations on two real-world recommendation datasets, which exhibit pronounced non-stationarity, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.  ( 2 min )

Traffic flow prediction is one of the most fundamental tasks of intelligent transportation systems. The complex and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies make the traffic flow prediction quite challenging. Although existing spatial-temporal graph neural networks hold prominent, they often encounter challenges such as (1) ignoring the fixed graph that limits the predictive performance of the model, (2) insufficiently capturing complex spatial-temporal dependencies simultaneously, and (3) lacking attention to spatial-temporal information at different time lengths. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Scale Spatial-Temporal Recurrent Network for traffic flow prediction, namely MSSTRN, which consists of two different recurrent neural networks: the single-step gate recurrent unit and the multi-step gate recurrent unit to fully capture the complex spatial-temporal information in the traffic data under different time windows. Moreover, we propose a spatial-temporal synchronous attention mechanism that integrates adaptive position graph convolutions into the self-attention mechanism to achieve synchronous capture of spatial-temporal dependencies. We conducted extensive experiments on four real traffic datasets and demonstrated that our model achieves the best prediction accuracy with non-trivial margins compared to all the twenty baseline methods.  ( 2 min )

In 1-bit compressed sensing, the aim is to estimate a $k$-sparse unit vector $x\in S^{n-1}$ within an $\epsilon$ error (in $\ell_2$) from minimal number of linear measurements that are quantized to just their signs, i.e., from measurements of the form $y = \mathrm{Sign}(\langle a, x\rangle).$ In this paper, we study a noisy version where a fraction of the measurements can be flipped, potentially by an adversary. In particular, we analyze the Binary Iterative Hard Thresholding (BIHT) algorithm, a proximal gradient descent on a properly defined loss function used for 1-bit compressed sensing, in this noisy setting. It is known from recent results that, with $\tilde{O}(\frac{k}{\epsilon})$ noiseless measurements, BIHT provides an estimate within $\epsilon$ error. This result is optimal and universal, meaning one set of measurements work for all sparse vectors. In this paper, we show that BIHT also provides better results than all known methods for the noisy setting. We show that when up to $\tau$-fraction of the sign measurements are incorrect (adversarial error), with the same number of measurements as before, BIHT agnostically provides an estimate of $x$ within an $\tilde{O}(\epsilon+\tau)$ error, maintaining the universality of measurements. This establishes stability of iterative hard thresholding in the presence of measurement error. To obtain the result, we use the restricted approximate invertibility of Gaussian matrices, as well as a tight analysis of the high-dimensional geometry of the adversarially corrupted measurements.  ( 3 min )

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is typically used to optimize an unknown function $f$ that is noisy and costly to evaluate, by exploiting an acquisition function that must be maximized at each optimization step. Even if provably asymptotically optimal BO algorithms are efficient at optimizing low-dimensional functions, scaling them to high-dimensional spaces remains an open problem, often tackled by assuming an additive structure for $f$. By doing so, BO algorithms typically introduce additional restrictive assumptions on the additive structure that reduce their applicability domain. This paper contains two main contributions: (i) we relax the restrictive assumptions on the additive structure of $f$, at the expense of weakening the maximization guarantees of the acquisition function, and (ii) we address the over-exploration problem for decentralized BO algorithms. To these ends, we propose DumBO, an asymptotically optimal decentralized BO algorithm that achieves very competitive performance against state-of-the-art BO algorithms, especially when the additive structure of $f$ comprises high-dimensional factors.  ( 2 min )

Among recent developments in time series forecasting methods, deep forecasting models have gained popularity as they can utilize hidden feature patterns in time series to improve forecasting performance. Nevertheless, the majority of current deep forecasting models are opaque, hence making it challenging to interpret the results. While counterfactual explanations have been extensively employed as a post-hoc approach for explaining classification models, their application to forecasting models still remains underexplored. In this paper, we formulate the novel problem of counterfactual generation for time series forecasting, and propose an algorithm, called ForecastCF, that solves the problem by applying gradient-based perturbations to the original time series. ForecastCF guides the perturbations by applying constraints to the forecasted values to obtain desired prediction outcomes. We experimentally evaluate ForecastCF using four state-of-the-art deep model architectures and compare to two baselines. Our results show that ForecastCF outperforms the baseline in terms of counterfactual validity and data manifold closeness. Overall, our findings suggest that ForecastCF can generate meaningful and relevant counterfactual explanations for various forecasting tasks.  ( 2 min )

Semantic identifier (ID) is an important concept in information retrieval that aims to preserve the semantics of objects such as documents and items inside their IDs. Previous studies typically adopt a two-stage pipeline to learn semantic IDs by first procuring embeddings using off-the-shelf text encoders and then deriving IDs based on the embeddings. However, each step introduces potential information loss and there is usually an inherent mismatch between the distribution of embeddings within the latent space produced by text encoders and the anticipated distribution required for semantic indexing. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to design a method that can learn the document's semantic representations and its hierarchical structure simultaneously, given that semantic IDs are discrete and sequentially structured, and the semantic supervision is deficient. In this paper, we introduce LMINDEXER, a self-supervised framework to learn semantic IDs with a generative language model. We tackle the challenge of sequential discrete ID by introducing a semantic indexer capable of generating neural sequential discrete representations with progressive training and contrastive learning. In response to the semantic supervision deficiency, we propose to train the model with a self-supervised document reconstruction objective. The learned semantic indexer can facilitate various downstream tasks, such as recommendation and retrieval. We conduct experiments on three tasks including recommendation, product search, and document retrieval on five datasets from various domains, where LMINDEXER outperforms competitive baselines significantly and consistently.

Federated learning allows multiple parties to collaboratively train a joint model without sharing local data. This enables applications of machine learning in settings of inherently distributed, undisclosable data such as in the medical domain. In practice, joint training is usually achieved by aggregating local models, for which local training objectives have to be in expectation similar to the joint (global) objective. Often, however, local datasets are so small that local objectives differ greatly from the global objective, resulting in federated learning to fail. We propose a novel approach that intertwines model aggregations with permutations of local models. The permutations expose each local model to a daisy chain of local datasets resulting in more efficient training in data-sparse domains. This enables training on extremely small local datasets, such as patient data across hospitals, while retaining the training efficiency and privacy benefits of federated learning.

Denoising diffusion models enable conditional generation and density modeling of complex relationships like images and text. However, the nature of the learned relationships is opaque making it difficult to understand precisely what relationships between words and parts of an image are captured, or to predict the effect of an intervention. We illuminate the fine-grained relationships learned by diffusion models by noticing a precise relationship between diffusion and information decomposition. Exact expressions for mutual information and conditional mutual information can be written in terms of the denoising model. Furthermore, pointwise estimates can be easily estimated as well, allowing us to ask questions about the relationships between specific images and captions. Decomposing information even further to understand which variables in a high-dimensional space carry information is a long-standing problem. For diffusion models, we show that a natural non-negative decomposition of mutual information emerges, allowing us to quantify informative relationships between words and pixels in an image. We exploit these new relations to measure the compositional understanding of diffusion models, to do unsupervised localization of objects in images, and to measure effects when selectively editing images through prompt interventions.

Public and private actors struggle to assess the vast amounts of information about sustainability commitments made by various institutions. To address this problem, we create a novel tool for automatically detecting corporate, national, and regional net zero and reduction targets in three steps. First, we introduce an expert-annotated data set with 3.5K text samples. Second, we train and release ClimateBERT-NetZero, a natural language classifier to detect whether a text contains a net zero or reduction target. Third, we showcase its analysis potential with two use cases: We first demonstrate how ClimateBERT-NetZero can be combined with conventional question-answering (Q&A) models to analyze the ambitions displayed in net zero and reduction targets. Furthermore, we employ the ClimateBERT-NetZero model on quarterly earning call transcripts and outline how communication patterns evolve over time. Our experiments demonstrate promising pathways for extracting and analyzing net zero and emission reduction targets at scale.

Recent research works have proposed machine learning models for classifying IoT devices connected to a network. However, there is still a practical challenge of not having all devices (and hence their traffic) available during the training of a model. This essentially means, during the operational phase, we need to classify new devices not seen during the training phase. To address this challenge, we propose ZEST -- a ZSL (zero-shot learning) framework based on self-attention for classifying both seen and unseen devices. ZEST consists of i) a self-attention based network feature extractor, termed SANE, for extracting latent space representations of IoT traffic, ii) a generative model that trains a decoder using latent features to generate pseudo data, and iii) a supervised model that is trained on the generated pseudo data for classifying devices. We carry out extensive experiments on real IoT traffic data; our experiments demonstrate i) ZEST achieves significant improvement (in terms of accuracy) over the baselines; ii) ZEST is able to better extract meaningful representations than LSTM which has been commonly used for modeling network traffic.  ( 2 min )

Leveraging nearest neighbor retrieval for self-supervised representation learning has proven beneficial with object-centric images. However, this approach faces limitations when applied to scene-centric datasets, where multiple objects within an image are only implicitly captured in the global representation. Such global bootstrapping can lead to undesirable entanglement of object representations. Furthermore, even object-centric datasets stand to benefit from a finer-grained bootstrapping approach. In response to these challenges, we introduce a novel Cross-Image Object-Level Bootstrapping method tailored to enhance dense visual representation learning. By employing object-level nearest neighbor bootstrapping throughout the training, CrIBo emerges as a notably strong and adequate candidate for in-context learning, leveraging nearest neighbor retrieval at test time. CrIBo shows state-of-the-art performance on the latter task while being highly competitive in more standard downstream segmentation tasks. Our code and pretrained models will be publicly available upon acceptance.  ( 2 min )

A major obstacle when attempting to train a machine learning system to evaluate facial clefts is the scarcity of large datasets of high-quality, ethics board-approved patient images. In response, we have built a deep learning-based cleft lip generator designed to produce an almost unlimited number of artificial images exhibiting high-fidelity facsimiles of cleft lip with wide variation. We undertook a transfer learning protocol testing different versions of StyleGAN-ADA (a generative adversarial network image generator incorporating adaptive data augmentation (ADA)) as the base model. Training images depicting a variety of cleft deformities were pre-processed to adjust for rotation, scaling, color adjustment and background blurring. The ADA modification of the primary algorithm permitted construction of our new generative model while requiring input of a relatively small number of training images. Adversarial training was carried out using 514 unique frontal photographs of cleft-affected faces to adapt a pre-trained model based on 70,000 normal faces. The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) was used to measure the similarity of the newly generated facial images to the cleft training dataset, while Perceptual Path Length (PPL) and the novel Divergence Index of Severity Histograms (DISH) measures were also used to assess the performance of the image generator that we dub CleftGAN. We found that StyleGAN3 with translation invariance (StyleGAN3-t) performed optimally as a base model. Generated images achieved a low FID reflecting a close similarity to our training input dataset of genuine cleft images. Low PPL and DISH measures reflected a smooth and semantically valid interpolation of images through the transfer learning process and a similar distribution of severity in the training and generated images, respectively.  ( 3 min )

Model identification of battery dynamics is a central problem in energy research; many energy management systems and design processes rely on accurate battery models for efficiency optimization. The standard methodology for battery modelling is traditional design of experiments (DoE), where the battery dynamics are excited with many different current profiles and the measured outputs are used to estimate the system dynamics. However, although it is possible to obtain useful models with the traditional approach, the process is time consuming and expensive because of the need to sweep many different current-profile configurations. In the present work, a novel DoE approach is developed based on deep reinforcement learning, which alters the configuration of the experiments on the fly based on the statistics of past experiments. Instead of sticking to a library of predefined current profiles, the proposed approach modifies the current profiles dynamically by updating the output space covered by past measurements, hence only the current profiles that are informative for future experiments are applied. Simulations and real experiments are used to show that the proposed approach gives models that are as accurate as those obtained with traditional DoE but by using 85\% less resources.  ( 2 min )

Researchers have long touted a vision of the future enabled by a proliferation of internet-of-things devices, including smart sensors, homes, and cities. Increasingly, embedding intelligence in such devices involves the use of deep neural networks. However, their storage and processing requirements make them prohibitive for cheap, off-the-shelf platforms. Overcoming those requirements is necessary for enabling widely-applicable smart devices. While many ways of making models smaller and more efficient have been developed, there is a lack of understanding of which ones are best suited for particular scenarios. More importantly for edge platforms, those choices cannot be analyzed in isolation from cost and user experience. In this work, we holistically explore how quantization, model scaling, and multi-modality interact with system components such as memory, sensors, and processors. We perform this hardware/software co-design from the cost, latency, and user-experience perspective, and develop a set of guidelines for optimal system design and model deployment for the most cost-constrained platforms. We demonstrate our approach using an end-to-end, on-device, biometric user authentication system using a $20 ESP-EYE board.  ( 2 min )

Few-shot object classification is the task of classifying objects in an image with limited number of examples as supervision. We propose a one-shot/few-shot classification model that can classify an object of any unseen class into a relatively general category in an hierarchically based classification. Our model uses a three-level hierarchical contrastive loss based ResNet152 classifier for classifying an object based on its features extracted from Image embedding, not used during the training phase. For our experimentation, we have used a subset of the ImageNet (ILSVRC-12) dataset that contains only the animal classes for training our model and created our own dataset of unseen classes for evaluating our trained model. Our model provides satisfactory results in classifying the unknown objects into a generic category which has been later discussed in greater detail.  ( 2 min )

We consider the problem of model selection in a high-dimensional sparse linear regression model under the differential privacy framework. In particular, we consider the problem of differentially private best subset selection and study its utility guarantee. We adopt the well-known exponential mechanism for selecting the best model, and under a certain margin condition, we establish its strong model recovery property. However, the exponential search space of the exponential mechanism poses a serious computational bottleneck. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for the sampling step and establish its polynomial mixing time to its stationary distribution in the problem parameters $n,p$, and $s$. Furthermore, we also establish approximate differential privacy for the final estimates of the Metropolis-Hastings random walk using its mixing property. Finally, we also perform some illustrative simulations that echo the theoretical findings of our main results.  ( 2 min )

Recent theoretical work has identified surprisingly simple reasoning problems, such as checking if two nodes in a graph are connected or simulating finite-state machines, that are provably unsolvable by standard transformers that answer immediately after reading their input. However, in practice, transformers' reasoning can be improved by allowing them to use a "chain of thought" or "scratchpad", i.e., generate and condition on a sequence of intermediate tokens before answering. Motivated by this, we ask: Does such intermediate generation fundamentally extend the computational power of a decoder-only transformer? We show that the answer is yes, but the amount of increase depends crucially on the amount of intermediate generation. For instance, we find that transformer decoders with a logarithmic number of decoding steps (w.r.t. the input length) push the limits of standard transformers only slightly, while a linear number of decoding steps adds a clear new ability (under standard complexity conjectures): recognizing all regular languages. Our results also imply that linear steps keep transformer decoders within context-sensitive languages, and polynomial steps make them recognize exactly the class of polynomial-time solvable problems -- the first exact characterization of a type of transformers in terms of standard complexity classes. Together, our results provide a nuanced framework for understanding how the length of a transformer's chain of thought or scratchpad impacts its reasoning power.  ( 2 min )

We propose a novel surrogate modelling approach to efficiently and accurately approximate the response of complex dynamical systems driven by time-varying exogenous excitations over extended time periods. Our approach, namely manifold nonlinear autoregressive modelling with exogenous input (mNARX), involves constructing a problem-specific exogenous input manifold that is optimal for constructing autoregressive surrogates. The manifold, which forms the core of mNARX, is constructed incrementally by incorporating the physics of the system, as well as prior expert- and domain- knowledge. Because mNARX decomposes the full problem into a series of smaller sub-problems, each with a lower complexity than the original, it scales well with the complexity of the problem, both in terms of training and evaluation costs of the final surrogate. Furthermore, mNARX synergizes well with traditional dimensionality reduction techniques, making it highly suitable for modelling dynamical systems with high-dimensional exogenous inputs, a class of problems that is typically challenging to solve. Since domain knowledge is particularly abundant in physical systems, such as those found in civil and mechanical engineering, mNARX is well suited for these applications. We demonstrate that mNARX outperforms traditional autoregressive surrogates in predicting the response of a classical coupled spring-mass system excited by a one-dimensional random excitation. Additionally, we show that mNARX is well suited for emulating very high-dimensional time- and state-dependent systems, even when affected by active controllers, by surrogating the dynamics of a realistic aero-servo-elastic onshore wind turbine simulator. In general, our results demonstrate that mNARX offers promising prospects for modelling complex dynamical systems, in terms of accuracy and efficiency.  ( 3 min )

The collective behavior of a network with heterogeneous, resource-limited information processing units (e.g., group of fish, flock of birds, or network of neurons) demonstrates high self-organization and complexity. These emergent properties arise from simple interaction rules where certain individuals can exhibit leadership-like behavior and influence the collective activity of the group. Motivated by the intricacy of these collectives, we propose a neural network (NN) architecture inspired by the rules observed in nature's collective ensembles. This NN structure contains workers that encompass one or more information processing units (e.g., neurons, filters, layers, or blocks of layers). Workers are either leaders or followers, and we train a leader-follower neural network (LFNN) by leveraging local error signals and optionally incorporating backpropagation (BP) and global loss. We investigate worker behavior and evaluate LFNNs through extensive experimentation. Our LFNNs trained with local error signals achieve significantly lower error rates than previous BP-free algorithms on MNIST and CIFAR-10 and even surpass BP-enabled baselines. In the case of ImageNet, our LFNN-l demonstrates superior scalability and outperforms previous BP-free algorithms by a significant margin.  ( 2 min )

Deep learning vulnerability detection has shown promising results in recent years. However, an important challenge that still blocks it from being very useful in practice is that the model is not robust under perturbation and it cannot generalize well over the out-of-distribution (OOD) data, e.g., applying a trained model to unseen projects in real world. We hypothesize that this is because the model learned non-robust features, e.g., variable names, that have spurious correlations with labels. When the perturbed and OOD datasets no longer have the same spurious features, the model prediction fails. To address the challenge, in this paper, we introduced causality into deep learning vulnerability detection. Our approach CausalVul consists of two phases. First, we designed novel perturbations to discover spurious features that the model may use to make predictions. Second, we applied the causal learning algorithms, specifically, do-calculus, on top of existing deep learning models to systematically remove the use of spurious features and thus promote causal based prediction. Our results show that CausalVul consistently improved the model accuracy, robustness and OOD performance for all the state-of-the-art models and datasets we experimented. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that introduces do calculus based causal learning to software engineering models and shows it's indeed useful for improving the model accuracy, robustness and generalization. Our replication package is located at https://figshare.com/s/0ffda320dcb96c249ef2.  ( 2 min )

Analytical theories suggest that higher-quality data can lead to lower test errors in models trained on a fixed data budget. Moreover, a model can be trained on a lower compute budget without compromising performance if a dataset can be stripped of its redundancies. Coreset selection (or data pruning) seeks to select a subset of the training data so as to maximize the performance of models trained on this subset, also referred to as coreset. There are two dominant approaches: (1) geometry-based data selection for maximizing data diversity in the coreset, and (2) functions that assign difficulty scores to samples based on training dynamics. Optimizing for data diversity leads to a coreset that is biased towards easier samples, whereas, selection by difficulty ranking omits easy samples that are necessary for the training of deep learning models. This demonstrates that data diversity and importance scores are two complementary factors that need to be jointly considered during coreset selection. We represent a dataset as an undirected graph and propose a novel pruning algorithm, D2 Pruning, that uses forward and reverse message passing over this dataset graph for coreset selection. D2 Pruning updates the difficulty scores of each example by incorporating the difficulty of its neighboring examples in the dataset graph. Then, these updated difficulty scores direct a graph-based sampling method to select a coreset that encapsulates both diverse and difficult regions of the dataset space. We evaluate supervised and self-supervised versions of our method on various vision and language datasets. Results show that D2 Pruning improves coreset selection over previous state-of-the-art methods for up to 70% pruning rates. Additionally, we find that using D2 Pruning for filtering large multimodal datasets leads to increased diversity in the dataset and improved generalization of pretrained models.  ( 3 min )

Randomized smoothing has recently attracted attentions in the field of adversarial robustness to provide provable robustness guarantees on smoothed neural network classifiers. However, existing works show that vanilla randomized smoothing usually does not provide good robustness performance and often requires (re)training techniques on the base classifier in order to boost the robustness of the resulting smoothed classifier. In this work, we propose two cost-effective approaches to boost the robustness of randomized smoothing while preserving its clean performance. The first approach introduces a new robust training method AdvMacerwhich combines adversarial training and robustness certification maximization for randomized smoothing. We show that AdvMacer can improve the robustness performance of randomized smoothing classifiers compared to SOTA baselines, while being 3x faster to train than MACER baseline. The second approach introduces a post-processing method EsbRS which greatly improves the robustness certificate based on building model ensembles. We explore different aspects of model ensembles that has not been studied by prior works and propose a novel design methodology to further improve robustness of the ensemble based on our theoretical analysis.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes a set of novel optimization algorithms for solving a class of convex optimization problems with time-varying streaming cost function. We develop an approach to track the optimal solution with a bounded error. Unlike the existing results, our algorithm is executed only by using the first-order derivatives of the cost function which makes it computationally efficient for optimization with time-varying cost function. We compare our algorithms to the gradient descent algorithm and show why gradient descent is not an effective solution for optimization problems with time-varying cost. Several examples including solving a model predictive control problem cast as a convex optimization problem with a streaming time-varying cost function demonstrate our results.  ( 2 min )

The growing interest in machine learning problems over graphs with additional node information such as texts, images, or labels has popularized methods that require the costly operation of processing the entire graph. Yet, little effort has been made to the development of fast local methods (i.e. without accessing the entire graph) that extract useful information from such data. To that end, we propose a study of local graph clustering using noisy node labels as a proxy for additional node information. In this setting, nodes receive initial binary labels based on cluster affiliation: 1 if they belong to the target cluster and 0 otherwise. Subsequently, a fraction of these labels is flipped. We investigate the benefits of incorporating noisy labels for local graph clustering. By constructing a weighted graph with such labels, we study the performance of graph diffusion-based local clustering method on both the original and the weighted graphs. From a theoretical perspective, we consider recovering an unknown target cluster with a single seed node in a random graph with independent noisy node labels. We provide sufficient conditions on the label noise under which, with high probability, using diffusion in the weighted graph yields a more accurate recovery of the target cluster. This approach proves more effective than using the given labels alone or using diffusion in the label-free original graph. Empirically, we show that reliable node labels can be obtained with just a few samples from an attributed graph. Moreover, utilizing these labels via diffusion in the weighted graph leads to significantly better local clustering performance across several real-world datasets, improving F1 scores by up to 13%.  ( 3 min )

We investigate the problem of stochastic, combinatorial multi-armed bandits where the learner only has access to bandit feedback and the reward function can be non-linear. We provide a general framework for adapting discrete offline approximation algorithms into sublinear $\alpha$-regret methods that only require bandit feedback, achieving $\mathcal{O}\left(T^\frac{2}{3}\log(T)^\frac{1}{3}\right)$ expected cumulative $\alpha$-regret dependence on the horizon $T$. The framework only requires the offline algorithms to be robust to small errors in function evaluation. The adaptation procedure does not even require explicit knowledge of the offline approximation algorithm -- the offline algorithm can be used as a black box subroutine. To demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework, the proposed framework is applied to diverse applications in submodular maximization. The new CMAB algorithms for submodular maximization with knapsack constraints outperform a full-bandit method developed for the adversarial setting in experiments with real-world data.  ( 3 min )

We propose to use a simulation driven inverse inference approach to model the dynamics of tree branches under manipulation. Learning branch dynamics and gaining the ability to manipulate deformable vegetation can help with occlusion-prone tasks, such as fruit picking in dense foliage, as well as moving overhanging vines and branches for navigation in dense vegetation. The underlying deformable tree geometry is encapsulated as coarse spring abstractions executed on parallel, non-differentiable simulators. The implicit statistical model defined by the simulator, reference trajectories obtained by actively probing the ground truth, and the Bayesian formalism, together guide the spring parameter posterior density estimation. Our non-parametric inference algorithm, based on Stein Variational Gradient Descent, incorporates biologically motivated assumptions into the inference process as neural network driven learnt joint priors; moreover, it leverages the finite difference scheme for gradient approximations. Real and simulated experiments confirm that our model can predict deformation trajectories, quantify the estimation uncertainty, and it can perform better when base-lined against other inference algorithms, particularly from the Monte Carlo family. The model displays strong robustness properties in the presence of heteroscedastic sensor noise; furthermore, it can generalise to unseen grasp locations.  ( 2 min )

Due to the limited information about emerging diseases, symptoms are hard to be noticed and recognized, so that the window for clinical intervention could be ignored. An effective prognostic model is expected to assist doctors in making right diagnosis and designing personalized treatment plan, so to promptly prevent unfavorable outcomes. However, in the early stage of a disease, limited data collection and clinical experiences, plus the concern out of privacy and ethics, may result in restricted data availability for reference, to the extent that even data labels are difficult to mark correctly. In addition, Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data of different diseases or of different sources of the same disease can prove to be having serious cross-dataset feature misalignment problems, greatly mutilating the efficiency of deep learning models. This article introduces a transfer learning method to build a transition model from source dataset to target dataset. By way of constraining the distribution shift of features generated in disparate domains, domain-invariant features that are exclusively relative to downstream tasks are captured, so to cultivate a unified domain-invariant encoder across various task domains to achieve better feature representation. Experimental results of several target tasks demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms competing baseline methods and has higher rate of training convergence, especially in dealing with limited data amount. A multitude of experiences have proven the efficacy of our method to provide more accurate predictions concerning newly emergent pandemics and other diseases.  ( 3 min )

This paper introduces Elastic Decision Transformer (EDT), a significant advancement over the existing Decision Transformer (DT) and its variants. Although DT purports to generate an optimal trajectory, empirical evidence suggests it struggles with trajectory stitching, a process involving the generation of an optimal or near-optimal trajectory from the best parts of a set of sub-optimal trajectories. The proposed EDT differentiates itself by facilitating trajectory stitching during action inference at test time, achieved by adjusting the history length maintained in DT. Further, the EDT optimizes the trajectory by retaining a longer history when the previous trajectory is optimal and a shorter one when it is sub-optimal, enabling it to "stitch" with a more optimal trajectory. Extensive experimentation demonstrates EDT's ability to bridge the performance gap between DT-based and Q Learning-based approaches. In particular, the EDT outperforms Q Learning-based methods in a multi-task regime on the D4RL locomotion benchmark and Atari games. Videos are available at: https://kristery.github.io/edt/  ( 2 min )

Theoretical studies on transfer learning or domain adaptation have so far focused on situations with a known hypothesis class or model; however in practice, some amount of model selection is usually involved, often appearing under the umbrella term of hyperparameter-tuning: for example, one may think of the problem of tuning for the right neural network architecture towards a target task, while leveraging data from a related source task. Now, in addition to the usual tradeoffs on approximation vs estimation errors involved in model selection, this problem brings in a new complexity term, namely, the transfer distance between source and target distributions, which is known to vary with the choice of hypothesis class. We present a first study of this problem, focusing on classification; in particular, the analysis reveals some remarkable phenomena: adaptive rates, i.e., those achievable with no distributional information, can be arbitrarily slower than oracle rates, i.e., when given knowledge on distances.  ( 2 min )

We study the problem of building a controller that can follow open-ended instructions in open-world environments. We propose to follow reference videos as instructions, which offer expressive goal specifications while eliminating the need for expensive text-gameplay annotations. A new learning framework is derived to allow learning such instruction-following controllers from gameplay videos while producing a video instruction encoder that induces a structured goal space. We implement our agent GROOT in a simple yet effective encoder-decoder architecture based on causal transformers. We evaluate GROOT against open-world counterparts and human players on a proposed Minecraft SkillForge benchmark. The Elo ratings clearly show that GROOT is closing the human-machine gap as well as exhibiting a 70% winning rate over the best generalist agent baseline. Qualitative analysis of the induced goal space further demonstrates some interesting emergent properties, including the goal composition and complex gameplay behavior synthesis. Code and video can be found on the website https://craftjarvis-groot.github.io.  ( 2 min )

The lack of standardized robustness metrics and the widespread reliance on numerous unrelated benchmark datasets for testing have created a gap between academically validated robust models and their often problematic practical adoption. To address this, we introduce XIMAGENET-12, an explainable benchmark dataset with over 200K images and 15,600 manual semantic annotations. Covering 12 categories from ImageNet to represent objects commonly encountered in practical life and simulating six diverse scenarios, including overexposure, blurring, color changing, etc., we further propose a novel robustness criterion that extends beyond model generation ability assessment. This benchmark dataset, along with related code, is available at https://sites.google.com/view/ximagenet-12/home. Researchers and practitioners can leverage this resource to evaluate the robustness of their visual models under challenging conditions and ultimately benefit from the demands of practical computer vision systems.  ( 2 min )

Neural network pruning has shown to be an effective technique for reducing the network size, trading desirable properties like generalization and robustness to adversarial attacks for higher sparsity. Recent work has claimed that adversarial pruning methods can produce sparse networks while also preserving robustness to adversarial examples. In this work, we first re-evaluate three state-of-the-art adversarial pruning methods, showing that their robustness was indeed overestimated. We then compare pruned and dense versions of the same models, discovering that samples on thin ice, i.e., closer to the unpruned model's decision boundary, are typically misclassified after pruning. We conclude by discussing how this intuition may lead to designing more effective adversarial pruning methods in future work.  ( 2 min )

Multiscale modeling of complex systems is crucial for understanding their intricacies. Data-driven multiscale modeling has emerged as a promising approach to tackle challenges associated with complex systems. On the other hand, self-similarity is prevalent in complex systems, hinting that large-scale complex systems can be modeled at a reduced cost. In this paper, we introduce a multiscale neural network framework that incorporates self-similarity as prior knowledge, facilitating the modeling of self-similar dynamical systems. For deterministic dynamics, our framework can discern whether the dynamics are self-similar. For uncertain dynamics, it can compare and determine which parameter set is closer to self-similarity. The framework allows us to extract scale-invariant kernels from the dynamics for modeling at any scale. Moreover, our method can identify the power law exponents in self-similar systems. Preliminary tests on the Ising model yielded critical exponents consistent with theoretical expectations, providing valuable insights for addressing critical phase transitions in non-equilibrium systems.  ( 2 min )

Choosing an appropriate tokenization scheme is often a bottleneck in low-resource cross-lingual transfer. To understand the downstream implications of text representation choices, we perform a comparative analysis on language models having diverse text representation modalities including 2 segmentation-based models (\texttt{BERT}, \texttt{mBERT}), 1 image-based model (\texttt{PIXEL}), and 1 character-level model (\texttt{CANINE}). First, we propose a scoring Language Quotient (LQ) metric capable of providing a weighted representation of both zero-shot and few-shot evaluation combined. Utilizing this metric, we perform experiments comprising 19 source languages and 133 target languages on three tasks (POS tagging, Dependency parsing, and NER). Our analysis reveals that image-based models excel in cross-lingual transfer when languages are closely related and share visually similar scripts. However, for tasks biased toward word meaning (POS, NER), segmentation-based models prove to be superior. Furthermore, in dependency parsing tasks where word relationships play a crucial role, models with their character-level focus, outperform others. Finally, we propose a recommendation scheme based on our findings to guide model selection according to task and language requirements.  ( 2 min )

Learning from Label Proportions (LLP) is a learning problem where only aggregate level labels are available for groups of instances, called bags, during training, and the aim is to get the best performance at the instance-level on the test data. This setting arises in domains like advertising and medicine due to privacy considerations. We propose a novel algorithmic framework for this problem that iteratively performs two main steps. For the first step (Pseudo Labeling) in every iteration, we define a Gibbs distribution over binary instance labels that incorporates a) covariate information through the constraint that instances with similar covariates should have similar labels and b) the bag level aggregated label. We then use Belief Propagation (BP) to marginalize the Gibbs distribution to obtain pseudo labels. In the second step (Embedding Refinement), we use the pseudo labels to provide supervision for a learner that yields a better embedding. Further, we iterate on the two steps again by using the second step's embeddings as new covariates for the next iteration. In the final iteration, a classifier is trained using the pseudo labels. Our algorithm displays strong gains against several SOTA baselines (up to 15%) for the LLP Binary Classification problem on various dataset types - tabular and Image. We achieve these improvements with minimal computational overhead above standard supervised learning due to Belief Propagation, for large bag sizes, even for a million samples.  ( 2 min )

We review four types of algorithms for physics-informed machine learning (PIML) inversion of geophysical data. The unifying equation is given by the joint objective function $\epsilon$: \begin{eqnarray} \epsilon^{||-PIML}&=&\lambda_1 \overbrace{||{\bf W}^{ML}({\bf H}_{{\bf w}} {\bf d}^{obs}-{\bf m})||^2}^{NN} + \lambda_2 \overbrace{{||{\bf W}^{FWI}({\bf L} {\bf m}-{\bf d}^{obs})||^2}}^{FWI} ~+ \nonumber\\ \nonumber\\ && + ~~Regularizer, \label{PIML.eq120} \end{eqnarray}where the optimal model ${\bf m}^*$ and weights $\bf w^*$ minimize $\epsilon$. Here, The matrix weights are given by the boldface symbol $\bf W$, and full waveform inversion (FWI) is typically computed using a finite-difference solution of the wave equation, where $\bf L$ represents the forward modeling operation of the wave equation as a function of the model $\bf m$. Also, a fully-connected neural network (NN) is used to compute the model ${\bf H_w}{\bf d}^{obs} \approx \bf m$ from the observed input data ${\bf d}^{obs}$. The selection of weights $\lambda_i$ and the NN operations determine one of four different PIML algorithms. PIML offers potential advantages over standard FWI through its enhanced ability to avoid local minima and the option to locally train the inversion operator, minimizing the requirement for extensive training data for global applicability. However, the effectiveness of PIML relies on the similarity between the test and trained data. Nevertheless, a possible strategy to overcome this limitation involves initial pretraining of a PIML architecture with data from a broader region, followed by fine-tuning for specific data-a method reminiscent of the way large language models are pretrained and adapted for various tasks.  ( 2 min )

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are a groundbreaking technology for interacting with external devices using brain signals. Despite advancements, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based Motor Imagery (MI) tasks face challenges like amplitude and phase variability, and complex spatial correlations, with a need for smaller model size and faster inference. This study introduces the LGL-BCI framework, employing a Geometric Deep Learning Framework for EEG processing in non-Euclidean metric spaces, particularly the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) Manifold space. LGL-BCI offers robust EEG data representation and captures spatial correlations. We propose an EEG channel selection solution via a feature decomposition algorithm to reduce SPD matrix dimensionality, with a lossless transformation boosting inference speed. Extensive experiments show LGL-BCI's superior accuracy and efficiency compared to current solutions, highlighting geometric deep learning's potential in MI-BCI applications. The efficiency, assessed on two public EEG datasets and two real-world EEG devices, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solution in accuracy ($82.54\%$ versus $62.22\%$) with fewer parameters (64.9M compared to 183.7M).  ( 2 min )

Keyphrase generation (KG) aims to generate a set of summarizing words or phrases given a source document, while keyphrase extraction (KE) aims to identify them from the text. Because the search space is much smaller in KE, it is often combined with KG to predict keyphrases that may or may not exist in the corresponding document. However, current unified approaches adopt sequence labeling and maximization-based generation that primarily operate at a token level, falling short in observing and scoring keyphrases as a whole. In this work, we propose SimCKP, a simple contrastive learning framework that consists of two stages: 1) An extractor-generator that extracts keyphrases by learning context-aware phrase-level representations in a contrastive manner while also generating keyphrases that do not appear in the document; 2) A reranker that adapts scores for each generated phrase by likewise aligning their representations with the corresponding document. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a significant margin.  ( 2 min )

Existing literature on adversarial Machine Learning (ML) focuses either on showing attacks that break every ML model, or defenses that withstand most attacks. Unfortunately, little consideration is given to the actual feasibility of the attack or the defense. Moreover, adversarial samples are often crafted in the "feature-space", making the corresponding evaluations of questionable value. Simply put, the current situation does not allow to estimate the actual threat posed by adversarial attacks, leading to a lack of secure ML systems. We aim to clarify such confusion in this paper. By considering the application of ML for Phishing Website Detection (PWD), we formalize the "evasion-space" in which an adversarial perturbation can be introduced to fool a ML-PWD -- demonstrating that even perturbations in the "feature-space" are useful. Then, we propose a realistic threat model describing evasion attacks against ML-PWD that are cheap to stage, and hence intrinsically more attractive for real phishers. After that, we perform the first statistically validated assessment of state-of-the-art ML-PWD against 12 evasion attacks. Our evaluation shows (i) the true efficacy of evasion attempts that are more likely to occur; and (ii) the impact of perturbations crafted in different evasion-spaces. Our realistic evasion attempts induce a statistically significant degradation (3-10% at p<0.05), and their cheap cost makes them a subtle threat. Notably, however, some ML-PWD are immune to our most realistic attacks (p=0.22). Finally, as an additional contribution of this journal publication, we are the first to consider the intriguing case wherein an attacker introduces perturbations in multiple evasion-spaces at the same time. These new results show that simultaneously applying perturbations in the problem- and feature-space can cause a drop in the detection rate from 0.95 to 0.  ( 3 min )

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations of all entity pairs in a document. A key challenge in DocRE is the cost of annotating such data which requires intensive human effort. Thus, we investigate the case of DocRE in a low-resource setting, and we find that existing models trained on low data overestimate the NA ("no relation") label, causing limited performance. In this work, we approach the problem from a calibration perspective and propose PRiSM, which learns to adapt logits based on relation semantic information. We evaluate our method on three DocRE datasets and demonstrate that integrating existing models with PRiSM improves performance by as much as 26.38 F1 score, while the calibration error drops as much as 36 times when trained with about 3% of data. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/brightjade/PRiSM.  ( 2 min )

This paper considers the best policy identification (BPI) problem in online Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). We are interested in algorithms that are model-free, have low regret, and identify an optimal policy with a high probability. Existing model-free algorithms for online CMDPs with sublinear regret and constraint violation do not provide any convergence guarantee to an optimal policy and provide only average performance guarantees when a policy is uniformly sampled at random from all previously used policies. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm, named Pruning-Refinement-Identification (PRI), based on a fundamental structural property of CMDPs we discover, called limited stochasticity. The property says for a CMDP with $N$ constraints, there exists an optimal policy with at most $N$ stochastic decisions. The proposed algorithm first identifies at which step and in which state a stochastic decision has to be taken and then fine-tunes the distributions of these stochastic decisions. PRI achieves trio objectives: (i) PRI is a model-free algorithm; and (ii) it outputs a near-optimal policy with a high probability at the end of learning; and (iii) in the tabular setting, PRI guarantees $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{K})$ regret and constraint violation, which significantly improves the best existing regret bound $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(K^{\frac{4}{5}})$ under a model-free algorithm, where $K$ is the total number of episodes.  ( 2 min )

With the success of large-scale pretraining in NLP, there is an increasing trend of applying it to the domain of life sciences. In particular, pretraining methods based on DNA sequences have garnered growing attention due to their potential to capture generic information about genes. However, existing pretraining methods for DNA sequences largely rely on direct adoptions of BERT pretraining from NLP, lacking a comprehensive understanding and a specifically tailored approach. To address this research gap, we first conducted a series of exploratory experiments and gained several insightful observations: 1) In the fine-tuning phase of downstream tasks, when using K-mer overlapping tokenization instead of K-mer non-overlapping tokenization, both overlapping and non-overlapping pretraining weights show consistent performance improvement.2) During the pre-training process, using K-mer overlapping tokenization quickly produces clear K-mer embeddings and reduces the loss to a very low level, while using K-mer non-overlapping tokenization results in less distinct embeddings and continuously decreases the loss. 3) Using overlapping tokenization causes the self-attention in the intermediate layers of pre-trained models to tend to overly focus on certain tokens, reflecting that these layers are not adequately optimized. In summary, overlapping tokenization can benefit the fine-tuning of downstream tasks but leads to inadequate pretraining with fast convergence. To unleash the pretraining potential, we introduce a novel approach called RandomMask, which gradually increases the task difficulty of BERT-like pretraining by continuously expanding its mask boundary, forcing the model to learn more knowledge. RandomMask is simple but effective, achieving top-tier performance across 26 datasets of 28 datasets spanning 7 downstream tasks.  ( 3 min )

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention mechanisms, examining how many example sequences they can memorize, as a function of the number of heads and sequence length. Motivated by experimental findings on vision transformers, we introduce novel assumptions about the linear independence of input data, distinct from the commonly used general-position assumption. Under these assumptions, we demonstrate that an attention layer with $H$ heads, dimension $d$, and context size $n < d$, featuring $\Theta(Hd^2)$ parameters, can memorize $\Omega(Hn)$ examples. Our analysis sheds light on how different attention heads handle various example sequences, aided by the softmax operator's saturation property. We validate our findings through experiments on synthetic data.  ( 2 min )

Benchmarking is a common method for evaluating trajectory prediction models for autonomous driving. Existing benchmarks rely on datasets, which are biased towards more common scenarios, such as cruising, and distance-based metrics that are computed by averaging over all scenarios. Following such a regiment provides a little insight into the properties of the models both in terms of how well they can handle different scenarios and how admissible and diverse their outputs are. There exist a number of complementary metrics designed to measure the admissibility and diversity of trajectories, however, they suffer from biases, such as length of trajectories. In this paper, we propose a new benChmarking paRadIgm for evaluaTing trajEctoRy predIction Approaches (CRITERIA). Particularly, we propose 1) a method for extracting driving scenarios at varying levels of specificity according to the structure of the roads, models' performance, and data properties for fine-grained ranking of prediction models; 2) A set of new bias-free metrics for measuring diversity, by incorporating the characteristics of a given scenario, and admissibility, by considering the structure of roads and kinematic compliancy, motivated by real-world driving constraints. 3) Using the proposed benchmark, we conduct extensive experimentation on a representative set of the prediction models using the large scale Argoverse dataset. We show that the proposed benchmark can produce a more accurate ranking of the models and serve as a means of characterizing their behavior. We further present ablation studies to highlight contributions of different elements that are used to compute the proposed metrics.  ( 3 min )

Reinforcement learning in sparse-reward navigation environments with expensive and limited interactions is challenging and poses a need for effective exploration. Motivated by complex navigation tasks that require real-world training (when cheap simulators are not available), we consider an agent that faces an unknown distribution of environments and must decide on an exploration strategy. It may leverage a series of training environments to improve its policy before it is evaluated in a test environment drawn from the same environment distribution. Most existing approaches focus on fixed exploration strategies, while the few that view exploration as a meta-optimization problem tend to ignore the need for cost-efficient exploration. We propose a cost-aware Bayesian optimization approach that efficiently searches over a class of dynamic subgoal-based exploration strategies. The algorithm adjusts a variety of levers -- the locations of the subgoals, the length of each episode, and the number of replications per trial -- in order to overcome the challenges of sparse rewards, expensive interactions, and noise. An experimental evaluation demonstrates that the new approach outperforms existing baselines across a number of problem domains. We also provide a theoretical foundation and prove that the method asymptotically identifies a near-optimal subgoal design.  ( 2 min )

We present AIRS: Automatic Intrinsic Reward Shaping that intelligently and adaptively provides high-quality intrinsic rewards to enhance exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). More specifically, AIRS selects shaping function from a predefined set based on the estimated task return in real-time, providing reliable exploration incentives and alleviating the biased objective problem. Moreover, we develop an intrinsic reward toolkit to provide efficient and reliable implementations of diverse intrinsic reward approaches. We test AIRS on various tasks of MiniGrid, Procgen, and DeepMind Control Suite. Extensive simulation demonstrates that AIRS can outperform the benchmarking schemes and achieve superior performance with simple architecture.  ( 2 min )

We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with a large number of items $m$ for sale to $n$ strategic bidders, whose valuations are drawn independently from high-dimensional, unknown prior distributions. It is well-known that optimal and even approximately-optimal mechanisms for this setting are notoriously difficult to characterize or compute, and, even when they can be found, are often rife with various counter-intuitive properties. In this paper, following a model introduced recently by Cai and Daskalakis~\cite{cai2022recommender}, we consider the case that bidders' prior distributions can be well-approximated by a topic model. We design an active learning component, responsible for interacting with the bidders and outputting low-dimensional approximations of their types, and a mechanism design component, responsible for robustifying mechanisms for the low-dimensional model to work for the approximate types of the former component. On the active learning front, we cast our problem in the framework of Randomized Linear Algebra (RLA) for regression problems, allowing us to import several breakthrough results from that line of research, and adapt them to our setting. On the mechanism design front, we remove many restrictive assumptions of prior work on the type of access needed to the underlying distributions and the associated mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to formulate connections between mechanism design, and RLA for active learning of regression problems, opening the door for further applications of randomized linear algebra primitives to mechanism design.  ( 3 min )

Current techniques for Out-of-Distribution (OoD) detection predominantly rely on quantifying predictive uncertainty and incorporating model regularization during the training phase, using either real or synthetic OoD samples. However, methods that utilize real OoD samples lack exploration and are prone to overfit the OoD samples at hand. Whereas synthetic samples are often generated based on features extracted from training data, rendering them less effective when the training and OoD data are highly overlapped in the feature space. In this work, we propose a Wasserstein-score-based generative adversarial training scheme to enhance OoD detection accuracy, which, for the first time, performs data augmentation and exploration simultaneously under the supervision of limited OoD samples. Specifically, the generator explores OoD spaces and generates synthetic OoD samples using feedback from the discriminator, while the discriminator exploits both the observed and synthesized samples for OoD detection using a predefined Wasserstein score. We provide theoretical guarantees that the optimal solutions of our generative scheme are statistically achievable through adversarial training in empirical settings. We then demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on various computer vision datasets and exhibits superior generalizability to unseen OoD data.  ( 2 min )

Given an image and an associated textual question, the purpose of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) is to provide a correct answer to the question with the aid of external knowledge bases. Prior KB-VQA models are usually formulated as a retriever-classifier framework, where a pre-trained retriever extracts textual or visual information from knowledge graphs and then makes a prediction among the candidates. Despite promising progress, there are two drawbacks with existing models. Firstly, modeling question-answering as multi-class classification limits the answer space to a preset corpus and lacks the ability of flexible reasoning. Secondly, the classifier merely consider "what is the answer" without "how to get the answer", which cannot ground the answer to explicit reasoning paths. In this paper, we confront the challenge of \emph{explainable open-set} KB-VQA, where the system is required to answer questions with entities at wild and retain an explainable reasoning path. To resolve the aforementioned issues, we propose a new retriever-ranker paradigm of KB-VQA, Graph pATH rankER (GATHER for brevity). Specifically, it contains graph constructing, pruning, and path-level ranking, which not only retrieves accurate answers but also provides inference paths that explain the reasoning process. To comprehensively evaluate our model, we reformulate the benchmark dataset OK-VQA with manually corrected entity-level annotations and release it as ConceptVQA. Extensive experiments on real-world questions demonstrate that our framework is not only able to perform open-set question answering across the whole knowledge base but provide explicit reasoning path.  ( 2 min )

Existing regression models tend to fall short in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation when the label distribution is imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression (VIR), which not only performs well in imbalanced regression but naturally produces reasonable uncertainty estimation as a byproduct. Different from typical variational autoencoders assuming I.I.D. representations (a data point's representation is not directly affected by other data points), our VIR borrows data with similar regression labels to compute the latent representation's variational distribution; furthermore, different from deterministic regression models producing point estimates, VIR predicts the entire normal-inverse-gamma distributions and modulates the associated conjugate distributions to impose probabilistic reweighting on the imbalanced data, thereby providing better uncertainty estimation. Experiments in several real-world datasets show that our VIR can outperform state-of-the-art imbalanced regression models in terms of both accuracy and uncertainty estimation. Code will soon be available at \url{https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/variational-imbalanced-regression}.  ( 2 min )

This system paper presents a software framework for the support of topological analysis pipelines in a distributed-memory model. While several recent papers introduced topology-based approaches for distributed-memory environments, these were reporting experiments obtained with tailored, mono-algorithm implementations. In contrast, we describe in this paper a general-purpose, generic framework for topological analysis pipelines, i.e. a sequence of topological algorithms interacting together, possibly on distinct numbers of processes. Specifically, we instantiated our framework with the MPI model, within the Topology ToolKit (TTK). While developing this framework, we faced several algorithmic and software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. We provide a taxonomy for the distributed-memory topological algorithms supported by TTK, depending on their communication needs and provide examples of hybrid MPI+thread parallelizations. Detailed performance analyses show that parallel efficiencies range from $20\%$ to $80\%$ (depending on the algorithms), and that the MPI-specific preconditioning introduced by our framework induces a negligible computation time overhead. We illustrate the new distributed-memory capabilities of TTK with an example of advanced analysis pipeline, combining multiple algorithms, run on the largest publicly available dataset we have found (120 billion vertices) on a standard cluster with 64 nodes (for a total of 1,536 cores). Finally, we provide a roadmap for the completion of TTK's MPI extension, along with generic recommendations for each algorithm communication category.  ( 3 min )

As machine learning technology gets applied to actual products and solutions, new challenges have emerged. Models unexpectedly fail to generalize to small changes in the distribution, tend to be confident on novel data they have never seen, or cannot communicate the rationale behind their decisions effectively with the end users. Collectively, we face a trustworthiness issue with the current machine learning technology. This textbook on Trustworthy Machine Learning (TML) covers a theoretical and technical background of four key topics in TML: Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Explainability, Uncertainty Quantification, and Evaluation of Trustworthiness. We discuss important classical and contemporary research papers of the aforementioned fields and uncover and connect their underlying intuitions. The book evolved from the homonymous course at the University of T\"ubingen, first offered in the Winter Semester of 2022/23. It is meant to be a stand-alone product accompanied by code snippets and various pointers to further sources on topics of TML. The dedicated website of the book is https://trustworthyml.io/.  ( 2 min )

Covariate shift occurs prevalently in practice, where the input distributions of the source and target data are substantially different. Despite its practical importance in various learning problems, most of the existing methods only focus on some specific learning tasks and are not well validated theoretically and numerically. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified analysis of general nonparametric methods in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) under covariate shift. Our theoretical results are established for a general loss belonging to a rich loss function family, which includes many commonly used methods as special cases, such as mean regression, quantile regression, likelihood-based classification, and margin-based classification. Two types of covariate shift problems are the focus of this paper and the sharp convergence rates are established for a general loss function to provide a unified theoretical analysis, which concurs with the optimal results in literature where the squared loss is used. Extensive numerical studies on synthetic and real examples confirm our theoretical findings and further illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.  ( 2 min )

Background: Missing data is a common challenge in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, which can lead to biased and incomplete analyses. The integration of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data with metabolomics data has emerged as a promising approach to enhance the accuracy of data imputation in metabolomics studies. Method: In this study, we propose a novel method that leverages the information from WGS data and reference metabolites to impute unknown metabolites. Our approach utilizes a multi-view variational autoencoder to jointly model the burden score, polygenetic risk score (PGS), and linkage disequilibrium (LD) pruned single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for feature extraction and missing metabolomics data imputation. By learning the latent representations of both omics data, our method can effectively impute missing metabolomics values based on genomic information. Results: We evaluate the performance of our method on empirical metabolomics datasets with missing values and demonstrate its superiority compared to conventional imputation techniques. Using 35 template metabolites derived burden scores, PGS and LD-pruned SNPs, the proposed methods achieved r2-scores > 0.01 for 71.55% of metabolites. Conclusion: The integration of WGS data in metabolomics imputation not only improves data completeness but also enhances downstream analyses, paving the way for more comprehensive and accurate investigations of metabolic pathways and disease associations. Our findings offer valuable insights into the potential benefits of utilizing WGS data for metabolomics data imputation and underscore the importance of leveraging multi-modal data integration in precision medicine research.  ( 3 min )

Diffusion models (DMs) represent state-of-the-art generative models for continuous inputs. DMs work by constructing a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) in the input space (ie, position space), and using a neural network to reverse it. In this work, we introduce a novel generative modeling framework grounded in \textbf{phase space dynamics}, where a phase space is defined as {an augmented space encompassing both position and velocity.} Leveraging insights from Stochastic Optimal Control, we construct a path measure in the phase space that enables efficient sampling. {In contrast to DMs, our framework demonstrates the capability to generate realistic data points at an early stage of dynamics propagation.} This early prediction sets the stage for efficient data generation by leveraging additional velocity information along the trajectory. On standard image generation benchmarks, our model yields favorable performance over baselines in the regime of small Number of Function Evaluations (NFEs). Furthermore, our approach rivals the performance of diffusion models equipped with efficient sampling techniques, underscoring its potential as a new tool generative modeling.  ( 2 min )

We aim to optimize the binary detection of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) based on emphysema presence in the lung with convolutional neural networks (CNN) by exploring manually adjusted versus automated window-setting optimization (WSO) on computed tomography (CT) images. 7,194 CT images (3,597 with COPD; 3,597 healthy controls) from 78 subjects (43 with COPD; 35 healthy controls) were selected retrospectively (10.2018-12.2019) and preprocessed. For each image, intensity values were manually clipped to the emphysema window setting and a baseline 'full-range' window setting. Class-balanced train, validation, and test sets contained 3,392, 1,114, and 2,688 images. The network backbone was optimized by comparing various CNN architectures. Furthermore, automated WSO was implemented by adding a customized layer to the model. The image-level area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve (AUC) [lower, upper limit 95% confidence] was utilized to compare model variations. Repeated inference (n=7) on the test set showed that the DenseNet was the most efficient backbone and achieved a mean AUC of 0.80 [0.76, 0.85] without WSO. Comparably, with input images manually adjusted to the emphysema window, the DenseNet model predicted COPD with a mean AUC of 0.86 [0.82, 0.89]. By adding a customized WSO layer to the DenseNet, an optimal window in the proximity of the emphysema window setting was learned automatically, and a mean AUC of 0.82 [0.78, 0.86] was achieved. Detection of COPD with DenseNet models was improved by WSO of CT data to the emphysema window setting range.  ( 3 min )

Image-level weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) reduces the usually vast data annotation cost by surrogate segmentation masks during training. The typical approach involves training an image classification network using global average pooling (GAP) on convolutional feature maps. This enables the estimation of object locations based on class activation maps (CAMs), which identify the importance of image regions. The CAMs are then used to generate pseudo-labels, in the form of segmentation masks, to supervise a segmentation model in the absence of pixel-level ground truth. Our work is based on two techniques for improving CAMs; importance sampling, which is a substitute for GAP, and the feature similarity loss, which utilizes a heuristic that object contours almost always align with color edges in images. However, both are based on the multinomial posterior with softmax, and implicitly assume that classes are mutually exclusive, which turns out suboptimal in our experiments. Thus, we reformulate both techniques based on binomial posteriors of multiple independent binary problems. This has two benefits; their performance is improved and they become more general, resulting in an add-on method that can boost virtually any WSSS method. This is demonstrated on a wide variety of baselines on the PASCAL VOC dataset, improving the region similarity and contour quality of all implemented state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on the MS COCO dataset show that our proposed add-on is well-suited for large-scale settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/arvijj/hfpl.  ( 3 min )

Decision trees are interpretable models that are well-suited to non-linear learning problems. Much work has been done on extending decision tree learning algorithms with differential privacy, a system that guarantees the privacy of samples within the training data. However, current state-of-the-art algorithms for this purpose sacrifice much utility for a small privacy benefit. These solutions create random decision nodes that reduce decision tree accuracy or spend an excessive share of the privacy budget on labeling leaves. Moreover, many works do not support continuous features or leak information about them. We propose a new method called PrivaTree based on private histograms that chooses good splits while consuming a small privacy budget. The resulting trees provide a significantly better privacy-utility trade-off and accept mixed numerical and categorical data without leaking information about numerical features. Finally, while it is notoriously hard to give robustness guarantees against data poisoning attacks, we demonstrate bounds for the expected accuracy and success rates of backdoor attacks against differentially-private learners. By leveraging the better privacy-utility trade-off of PrivaTree we are able to train decision trees with significantly better robustness against backdoor attacks compared to regular decision trees and with meaningful theoretical guarantees.  ( 2 min )

The distribution of the weights of modern deep neural networks (DNNs) - crucial for uncertainty quantification and robustness - is an eminently complex object due to its extremely high dimensionality. This paper proposes one of the first large-scale explorations of the posterior distribution of deep Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs), expanding its study to real-world vision tasks and architectures. Specifically, we investigate the optimal approach for approximating the posterior, analyze the connection between posterior quality and uncertainty quantification, delve into the impact of modes on the posterior, and explore methods for visualizing the posterior. Moreover, we uncover weight-space symmetries as a critical aspect for understanding the posterior. To this extent, we develop an in-depth assessment of the impact of both permutation and scaling symmetries that tend to obfuscate the Bayesian posterior. While the first type of transformation is known for duplicating modes, we explore the relationship between the latter and L2 regularization, challenging previous misconceptions. Finally, to help the community improve our understanding of the Bayesian posterior, we will shortly release the first large-scale checkpoint dataset, including thousands of real-world models and our codes.

Despite the great progress of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) with the deep neural networks, current UDA models are opaque and cannot provide promising explanations, limiting their applications in the scenarios that require safe and controllable model decisions. At present, a surge of work focuses on designing deep interpretable methods with adequate data annotations and only a few methods consider the distributional shift problem. Most existing interpretable UDA methods are post-hoc ones, which cannot facilitate the model learning process for performance enhancement. In this paper, we propose an inherently interpretable method, named Transferable Conceptual Prototype Learning (TCPL), which could simultaneously interpret and improve the processes of knowledge transfer and decision-making in UDA. To achieve this goal, we design a hierarchically prototypical module that transfers categorical basic concepts from the source domain to the target domain and learns domain-shared prototypes for explaining the underlying reasoning process. With the learned transferable prototypes, a self-predictive consistent pseudo-label strategy that fuses confidence, predictions, and prototype information, is designed for selecting suitable target samples for pseudo annotations and gradually narrowing down the domain gap. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method can not only provide effective and intuitive explanations but also outperform previous state-of-the-arts.  ( 2 min )

Machine learning (ML) approaches are increasingly being used to accelerate combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. We look specifically at the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and propose Graph-SCP, a graph neural network method that can augment existing optimization solvers by learning to identify a much smaller sub-problem that contains the solution space. We evaluate the performance of Graph-SCP on synthetic weighted and unweighted SCP instances with diverse problem characteristics and complexities, and on instances from the OR Library, a canonical benchmark for SCP. We show that Graph-SCP reduces the problem size by 30-70% and achieves run time speedups up to~25x when compared to commercial solvers (Gurobi). Given a desired optimality threshold, Graph-SCP will improve upon it or even achieve 100% optimality. This is in contrast to fast greedy solutions that significantly compromise solution quality to achieve guaranteed polynomial run time. Graph-SCP can generalize to larger problem sizes and can be used with other conventional or ML-augmented CO solvers to lead to potential additional run time improvement.  ( 2 min )

Surrogate Optimization (SO) algorithms have shown promise for optimizing expensive black-box functions. However, their performance is heavily influenced by hyperparameters related to sampling and surrogate fitting, which poses a challenge to their widespread adoption. We investigate the impact of hyperparameters on various SO algorithms and propose a Hyperparameter Adaptive Search for SO (HASSO) approach. HASSO is not a hyperparameter tuning algorithm, but a generic self-adjusting SO algorithm that dynamically tunes its own hyperparameters while concurrently optimizing the primary objective function, without requiring additional evaluations. The aim is to improve the accessibility, effectiveness, and convergence speed of SO algorithms for practitioners. Our approach identifies and modifies the most influential hyperparameters specific to each problem and SO approach, reducing the need for manual tuning without significantly increasing the computational burden. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HASSO in enhancing the performance of various SO algorithms across different global optimization test problems.  ( 2 min )

Temporal difference learning (TD) is a foundational concept in reinforcement learning (RL), aimed at efficiently assessing a policy's value function. TD($\lambda$), a potent variant, incorporates a memory trace to distribute the prediction error into the historical context. However, this approach often neglects the significance of historical states and the relative importance of propagating the TD error, influenced by challenges such as visitation imbalance or outcome noise. To address this, we propose a novel TD algorithm named discerning TD learning (DTD), which allows flexible emphasis functions$-$predetermined or adapted during training$-$to allocate efforts effectively across states. We establish the convergence properties of our method within a specific class of emphasis functions and showcase its promising potential for adaptation to deep RL contexts. Empirical results underscore that employing a judicious emphasis function not only improves value estimation but also expedites learning across diverse scenarios.  ( 2 min )

In the realm of robotics, numerous downstream robotics tasks leverage machine learning methods for processing, modeling, or synthesizing data. Often, this data comprises variables that inherently carry geometric constraints, such as the unit-norm condition of quaternions representing rigid-body orientations or the positive definiteness of stiffness and manipulability ellipsoids. Handling such geometric constraints effectively requires the incorporation of tools from differential geometry into the formulation of machine learning methods. In this context, Riemannian manifolds emerge as a powerful mathematical framework to handle such geometric constraints. Nevertheless, their recent adoption in robot learning has been largely characterized by a mathematically-flawed simplification, hereinafter referred to as the ``single tangent space fallacy". This approach involves merely projecting the data of interest onto a single tangent (Euclidean) space, over which an off-the-shelf learning algorithm is applied. This paper provides a theoretical elucidation of various misconceptions surrounding this approach and offers experimental evidence of its shortcomings. Finally, it presents valuable insights to promote best practices when employing Riemannian geometry within robot learning applications.  ( 2 min )

Scaling of deep neural networks, especially Transformers, is pivotal for their surging performance and has further led to the emergence of sophisticated reasoning capabilities in foundation models. Such scaling generally requires training large models from scratch with random initialization, failing to leverage the knowledge acquired by their smaller counterparts, which are already resource-intensive to obtain. To tackle this inefficiency, we present $\textbf{L}$ossl$\textbf{E}$ss $\textbf{MO}$del Expansio$\textbf{N}$ (LEMON), a recipe to initialize scaled models using the weights of their smaller but pre-trained counterparts. This is followed by model training with an optimized learning rate scheduler tailored explicitly for the scaled models, substantially reducing the training time compared to training from scratch. Notably, LEMON is versatile, ensuring compatibility with various network structures, including models like Vision Transformers and BERT. Our empirical results demonstrate that LEMON reduces computational costs by 56.7% for Vision Transformers and 33.2% for BERT when compared to training from scratch.  ( 2 min )

It is well-established that large, diverse datasets play a pivotal role in the performance of modern AI systems for text and image modalities. However, there are no datasets for tabular data of comparable size and diversity to those available for text and images. Thus we present "TabLib'', a compilation of 627 million tables totaling 69 TiB, along with 867B tokens of context. TabLib was extracted from numerous file formats, including CSV, HTML, SQLite, PDF, Excel, and others, sourced from GitHub and Common Crawl. The size and diversity of TabLib offer considerable promise in the table modality, reminiscent of the original promise of foundational datasets for text and images, such as The Pile and LAION.  ( 2 min )

In this study, we present a graph neural network-based learning approach using an autoencoder setup to derive low-dimensional variables from features observed in experimental crystal structures. These variables are then biased in enhanced sampling to observe state-to-state transitions and reliable thermodynamic weights. Our approach uses simple convolution and pooling methods. To verify the effectiveness of our protocol, we examined the nucleation of various allotropes and polymorphs of iron and glycine from their molten states. Our graph latent variables when biased in well-tempered metadynamics consistently show transitions between states and achieve accurate free energy calculations in agreement with experiments, both of which are indicators of dependable sampling. This underscores the strength and promise of our graph neural net variables for improved sampling. The protocol shown here should be applicable for other systems and with other sampling methods.  ( 2 min )

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions of state-action features. This class is known to be more general than linear MDPs, where the transition kernel and the reward function are assumed to be linear functions of the feature vectors. As our first contribution, we show that the difference between the two classes is the presence of states in linearly $q^\pi$-realizable MDPs where for any policy, all the actions have approximately equal values, and skipping over these states by following an arbitrarily fixed policy in those states transforms the problem to a linear MDP. Based on this observation, we derive a novel (computationally inefficient) learning algorithm for linearly $q^\pi$-realizable MDPs that simultaneously learns what states should be skipped over and runs another learning algorithm on the linear MDP hidden in the problem. The method returns an $\epsilon$-optimal policy after $\text{polylog}(H, d)/\epsilon^2$ interactions with the MDP, where $H$ is the time horizon and $d$ is the dimension of the feature vectors, giving the first polynomial-sample-complexity online RL algorithm for this setting. The results are proved for the misspecified case, where the sample complexity is shown to degrade gracefully with the misspecification error.  ( 3 min )

By encoding time series as a string of numerical digits, we can frame time series forecasting as next-token prediction in text. Developing this approach, we find that large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and LLaMA-2 can surprisingly zero-shot extrapolate time series at a level comparable to or exceeding the performance of purpose-built time series models trained on the downstream tasks. To facilitate this performance, we propose procedures for effectively tokenizing time series data and converting discrete distributions over tokens into highly flexible densities over continuous values. We argue the success of LLMs for time series stems from their ability to naturally represent multimodal distributions, in conjunction with biases for simplicity, and repetition, which align with the salient features in many time series, such as repeated seasonal trends. We also show how LLMs can naturally handle missing data without imputation through non-numerical text, accommodate textual side information, and answer questions to help explain predictions. While we find that increasing model size generally improves performance on time series, we show GPT-4 can perform worse than GPT-3 because of how it tokenizes numbers, and poor uncertainty calibration, which is likely the result of alignment interventions such as RLHF.  ( 2 min )

Station keeping is an essential maneuver for Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs), mainly when used in confined spaces, to carry out surveys that require the ASV to keep its position or in collaboration with other vehicles where the relative position has an impact over the mission. However, this maneuver can become challenging for classic feedback controllers due to the need for an accurate model of the ASV dynamics and the environmental disturbances. This work proposes a Model Predictive Controller using Neural Network Simulation Error Minimization (NNSEM-MPC) to accurately predict the dynamics of the ASV under wind disturbances. The performance of the proposed scheme under wind disturbances is tested and compared against other controllers in simulation, using the Robotics Operating System (ROS) and the multipurpose simulation environment Gazebo. A set of six tests were conducted by combining two wind speeds (3 m/s and 6 m/s) and three wind directions (0$^\circ$, 90$^\circ$, and 180$^\circ$). The simulation results clearly show the advantage of the NNSEM-MPC over the following methods: backstepping controller, sliding mode controller, simplified dynamics MPC (SD-MPC), neural ordinary differential equation MPC (NODE-MPC), and knowledge-based NODE MPC (KNODE-MPC). The proposed NNSEM-MPC approach performs better than the rest in 4 out of the 6 test conditions, and it is the second best in the 2 remaining test cases, reducing the mean position and heading error by at least 31\% and 46\% respectively across all the test cases. In terms of execution speed, the proposed NNSEM-MPC is at least 36\% faster than the rest of the MPC controllers. The field experiments on two different ASV platforms showed that ASVs can effectively keep the station utilizing the proposed method, with a position error as low as $1.68$ m and a heading error as low as $6.14^{\circ}$ within time windows of at least $150$s.  ( 3 min )

Robotic learning for navigation in unfamiliar environments needs to provide policies for both task-oriented navigation (i.e., reaching a goal that the robot has located), and task-agnostic exploration (i.e., searching for a goal in a novel setting). Typically, these roles are handled by separate models, for example by using subgoal proposals, planning, or separate navigation strategies. In this paper, we describe how we can train a single unified diffusion policy to handle both goal-directed navigation and goal-agnostic exploration, with the latter providing the ability to search novel environments, and the former providing the ability to reach a user-specified goal once it has been located. We show that this unified policy results in better overall performance when navigating to visually indicated goals in novel environments, as compared to approaches that use subgoal proposals from generative models, or prior methods based on latent variable models. We instantiate our method by using a large-scale Transformer-based policy trained on data from multiple ground robots, with a diffusion model decoder to flexibly handle both goal-conditioned and goal-agnostic navigation. Our experiments, conducted on a real-world mobile robot platform, show effective navigation in unseen environments in comparison with five alternative methods, and demonstrate significant improvements in performance and lower collision rates, despite utilizing smaller models than state-of-the-art approaches. For more videos, code, and pre-trained model checkpoints, see https://general-navigation-models.github.io/nomad/  ( 2 min )

Distributed optimization methods with random communication skips are gaining increasing attention due to their proven benefits in accelerating communication complexity. Nevertheless, existing research mainly focuses on centralized communication protocols for strongly convex deterministic settings. In this work, we provide a decentralized optimization method called RandCom, which incorporates probabilistic local updates. We analyze the performance of RandCom in stochastic non-convex, convex, and strongly convex settings and demonstrate its ability to asymptotically reduce communication overhead by the probability of communication. Additionally, we prove that RandCom achieves linear speedup as the number of nodes increases. In stochastic strongly convex settings, we further prove that RandCom can achieve linear speedup with network-independent stepsizes. Moreover, we apply RandCom to federated learning and provide positive results concerning the potential for achieving linear speedup and the suitability of the probabilistic local update approach for non-convex settings.  ( 2 min )

For over two decades, detecting rare events has been a challenging task among researchers in the data mining and machine learning domain. Real-life problems inspire researchers to navigate and further improve data processing and algorithmic approaches to achieve effective and computationally efficient methods for imbalanced learning. In this paper, we have collected and reviewed 258 peer-reviewed papers from archival journals and conference papers in an attempt to provide an in-depth review of various approaches in imbalanced learning from technical and application perspectives. This work aims to provide a structured review of methods used to address the problem of imbalanced data in various domains and create a general guideline for researchers in academia or industry who want to dive into the broad field of machine learning using large-scale imbalanced data.  ( 2 min )

The current era of quantum computing has yielded several algorithms that promise high computational efficiency. While the algorithms are sound in theory and can provide potentially exponential speedup, there is little guidance on how to design proper quantum circuits to realize the appropriate unitary transformation to be applied to the input quantum state. In this paper, we present \texttt{QArchSearch}, an AI based quantum architecture search package with the \texttt{QTensor} library as a backend that provides a principled and automated approach to finding the best model given a task and input quantum state. We show that the search package is able to efficiently scale the search to large quantum circuits and enables the exploration of more complex models for different quantum applications. \texttt{QArchSearch} runs at scale and high efficiency on high-performance computing systems using a two-level parallelization scheme on both CPUs and GPUs, which has been demonstrated on the Polaris supercomputer.  ( 2 min )

Learning rate schedules used in practice bear little resemblance to those recommended by theory. We close much of this theory/practice gap, and as a consequence are able to derive new problem-adaptive learning rate schedules. Our key technical contribution is a refined analysis of learning rate schedules for a wide class of optimization algorithms (including SGD). In contrast to most prior works that study the convergence of the average iterate, we study the last iterate, which is what most people use in practice. When considering only worst-case analysis, our theory predicts that the best choice is the linear decay schedule: a popular choice in practice that sets the stepsize proportionally to $1 - t/T$, where $t$ is the current iteration and $T$ is the total number of steps. To go beyond this worst-case analysis, we use the observed gradient norms to derive schedules refined for any particular task. These refined schedules exhibit learning rate warm-up and rapid learning rate annealing near the end of training. Ours is the first systematic approach to automatically yield both of these properties. We perform the most comprehensive evaluation of learning rate schedules to date, evaluating across 10 diverse deep learning problems, a series of LLMs, and a suite of logistic regression problems. We validate that overall, the linear-decay schedule matches or outperforms all commonly used default schedules including cosine annealing, and that our schedule refinement method gives further improvements.  ( 3 min )

Fully-connected deep neural networks with weights initialized from independent Gaussian distributions can be tuned to criticality, which prevents the exponential growth or decay of signals propagating through the network. However, such networks still exhibit fluctuations that grow linearly with the depth of the network, which may impair the training of networks with width comparable to depth. We show analytically that rectangular networks with tanh activations and weights initialized from the ensemble of orthogonal matrices have corresponding preactivation fluctuations which are independent of depth, to leading order in inverse width. Moreover, we demonstrate numerically that, at initialization, all correlators involving the neural tangent kernel (NTK) and its descendants at leading order in inverse width -- which govern the evolution of observables during training -- saturate at a depth of $\sim 20$, rather than growing without bound as in the case of Gaussian initializations. We speculate that this structure preserves finite-width feature learning while reducing overall noise, thus improving both generalization and training speed. We provide some experimental justification by relating empirical measurements of the NTK to the superior performance of deep nonlinear orthogonal networks trained under full-batch gradient descent on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 classification tasks.  ( 2 min )

A common approach to explain NLP models, is to use importance measures that express which tokens are important for a prediction. Unfortunately, such explanations are often wrong despite being persuasive. Therefore, it is essential to measure their faithfulness. One such metric is if tokens are truly important, then masking them should result in worse model performance. However, token masking introduces out-of-distribution issues and existing solutions are computationally expensive and employ proxy-models. Furthermore, other metrics are very limited in scope. In this work, we propose an inherently faithfulness measurable model that addresses these challenges. This is achieved by using a novel fine-tuning method that incorporates masking, such that masking tokens become in-distribution by design. This differs from existing approaches, which are completely model-agnostic but are inapplicable in practice. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by applying it to various tasks and validate it using statistical in-distribution tests. Additionally, because masking is in-distribution, importance measures which themselves use masking become more faithful, thus our model becomes more explainable.  ( 2 min )

This paper discusses predictive performance and processes undertaken on flight pricing data utilizing r2(r-square) and RMSE that leverages a large dataset, originally from Expedia.com, consisting of approximately 20 million records or 4.68 gigabytes. The project aims to determine the best models usable in the real world to predict airline ticket fares for non-stop flights across the US. Therefore, good generalization capability and optimized processing times are important measures for the model. We will discover key business insights utilizing feature importance and discuss the process and tools used for our analysis. Four regression machine learning algorithms were utilized: Random Forest, Gradient Boost Tree, Decision Tree, and Factorization Machines utilizing Cross Validator and Training Validator functions for assessing performance and generalization capability.  ( 2 min )

Self-supervised representation learning~(SSRL) has advanced considerably by exploiting the transformation invariance assumption under artificially designed data augmentations. While augmentation-based SSRL algorithms push the boundaries of performance in computer vision and natural language processing, they are often not directly applicable to other data modalities, and can conflict with application-specific data augmentation constraints. This paper presents an SSRL approach that can be applied to any data modality and network architecture because it does not rely on augmentations or masking. Specifically, we show that high-quality data representations can be learned by reconstructing random data projections. We evaluate the proposed approach on a wide range of representation learning tasks that span diverse modalities and real-world applications. We show that it outperforms multiple state-of-the-art SSRL baselines. Due to its wide applicability and strong empirical results, we argue that learning from randomness is a fruitful research direction worthy of attention and further study.  ( 2 min )

Activation functions (AFs) are crucial components of deep neural networks (DNNs), having a significant impact on their performance. An activation function in a DNN is typically a smooth, nonlinear function that transforms an input signal into an output signal for the subsequent layer. In this paper, we propose the Parametric Leaky Tanh (PLTanh), a novel hybrid activation function designed to combine the strengths of both the Tanh and Leaky ReLU (LReLU) activation functions. PLTanh is differentiable at all points and addresses the 'dying ReLU' problem by ensuring a non-zero gradient for negative inputs, consistent with the behavior of LReLU. By integrating the unique advantages of these two diverse activation functions, PLTanh facilitates the learning of more intricate nonlinear relationships within the network. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of PLTanh against established activation functions, namely ReLU, LReLU, and ALReLU utilizing five diverse datasets.  ( 2 min )

The challenge of navigation in environments with dynamic objects continues to be a central issue in the study of autonomous agents. While predictive methods hold promise, their reliance on precise state information makes them less practical for real-world implementation. This study presents visual forecasting as an innovative alternative. By introducing intuitive visual cues, this approach projects the future trajectories of dynamic objects to improve agent perception and enable anticipatory actions. Our research explores two distinct strategies for conveying predictive information through visual forecasting: (1) sequences of bounding boxes, and (2) augmented paths. To validate the proposed visual forecasting strategies, we initiate evaluations in simulated environments using the Unity engine and then extend these evaluations to real-world scenarios to assess both practicality and effectiveness. The results confirm the viability of visual forecasting as a promising solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance in dynamic environments.  ( 2 min )

Fully-connected deep neural networks with weights initialized from independent Gaussian distributions can be tuned to criticality, which prevents the exponential growth or decay of signals propagating through the network. However, such networks still exhibit fluctuations that grow linearly with the depth of the network, which may impair the training of networks with width comparable to depth. We show analytically that rectangular networks with tanh activations and weights initialized from the ensemble of orthogonal matrices have corresponding preactivation fluctuations which are independent of depth, to leading order in inverse width. Moreover, we demonstrate numerically that, at initialization, all correlators involving the neural tangent kernel (NTK) and its descendants at leading order in inverse width -- which govern the evolution of observables during training -- saturate at a depth of $\sim 20$, rather than growing without bound as in the case of Gaussian initializations. We speculate that this structure preserves finite-width feature learning while reducing overall noise, thus improving both generalization and training speed. We provide some experimental justification by relating empirical measurements of the NTK to the superior performance of deep nonlinear orthogonal networks trained under full-batch gradient descent on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 classification tasks.  ( 2 min )

Scaling of deep neural networks, especially Transformers, is pivotal for their surging performance and has further led to the emergence of sophisticated reasoning capabilities in foundation models. Such scaling generally requires training large models from scratch with random initialization, failing to leverage the knowledge acquired by their smaller counterparts, which are already resource-intensive to obtain. To tackle this inefficiency, we present $\textbf{L}$ossl$\textbf{E}$ss $\textbf{MO}$del Expansio$\textbf{N}$ (LEMON), a recipe to initialize scaled models using the weights of their smaller but pre-trained counterparts. This is followed by model training with an optimized learning rate scheduler tailored explicitly for the scaled models, substantially reducing the training time compared to training from scratch. Notably, LEMON is versatile, ensuring compatibility with various network structures, including models like Vision Transformers and BERT. Our empirical results demonstrate that LEMON reduces computational costs by 56.7% for Vision Transformers and 33.2% for BERT when compared to training from scratch.

Consider the problem of estimating a random variable $X$ from noisy observations $Y = X+ Z$, where $Z$ is standard normal, under the $L^1$ fidelity criterion. It is well known that the optimal Bayesian estimator in this setting is the conditional median. This work shows that the only prior distribution on $X$ that induces linearity in the conditional median is Gaussian. Along the way, several other results are presented. In particular, it is demonstrated that if the conditional distribution $P_{X|Y=y}$ is symmetric for all $y$, then $X$ must follow a Gaussian distribution. Additionally, we consider other $L^p$ losses and observe the following phenomenon: for $p \in [1,2]$, Gaussian is the only prior distribution that induces a linear optimal Bayesian estimator, and for $p \in (2,\infty)$, infinitely many prior distributions on $X$ can induce linearity. Finally, extensions are provided to encompass noise models leading to conditional distributions from certain exponential families.

The distribution of the weights of modern deep neural networks (DNNs) - crucial for uncertainty quantification and robustness - is an eminently complex object due to its extremely high dimensionality. This paper proposes one of the first large-scale explorations of the posterior distribution of deep Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs), expanding its study to real-world vision tasks and architectures. Specifically, we investigate the optimal approach for approximating the posterior, analyze the connection between posterior quality and uncertainty quantification, delve into the impact of modes on the posterior, and explore methods for visualizing the posterior. Moreover, we uncover weight-space symmetries as a critical aspect for understanding the posterior. To this extent, we develop an in-depth assessment of the impact of both permutation and scaling symmetries that tend to obfuscate the Bayesian posterior. While the first type of transformation is known for duplicating modes, we explore the relationship between the latter and L2 regularization, challenging previous misconceptions. Finally, to help the community improve our understanding of the Bayesian posterior, we will shortly release the first large-scale checkpoint dataset, including thousands of real-world models and our codes.

This paper introduces a novel model-agnostic algorithm called adaptive ensemble batch multi-input multi-output conformalized quantile regression (AEnbMIMOCQR} that enables forecasters to generate multi-step ahead prediction intervals for a fixed pre-specified miscoverage rate in a distribution-free manner. Our method is grounded on conformal prediction principles, however, it does not require data splitting and provides close to exact coverage even when the data is not exchangeable. Moreover, the resulting prediction intervals, besides being empirically valid along the forecast horizon, do not neglect heteroscedasticity. AEnbMIMOCQR is designed to be robust to distribution shifts, which means that its prediction intervals remain reliable over an unlimited period of time, without entailing retraining or imposing unrealistic strict assumptions on the data-generating process. Through methodically experimentation, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms other competitive methods on both real-world and synthetic datasets. The code used in the experimental part and a tutorial on how to use AEnbMIMOCQR can be found at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/Quilograma/AEnbMIMOCQR.

Distributed optimization methods with random communication skips are gaining increasing attention due to their proven benefits in accelerating communication complexity. Nevertheless, existing research mainly focuses on centralized communication protocols for strongly convex deterministic settings. In this work, we provide a decentralized optimization method called RandCom, which incorporates probabilistic local updates. We analyze the performance of RandCom in stochastic non-convex, convex, and strongly convex settings and demonstrate its ability to asymptotically reduce communication overhead by the probability of communication. Additionally, we prove that RandCom achieves linear speedup as the number of nodes increases. In stochastic strongly convex settings, we further prove that RandCom can achieve linear speedup with network-independent stepsizes. Moreover, we apply RandCom to federated learning and provide positive results concerning the potential for achieving linear speedup and the suitability of the probabilistic local update approach for non-convex settings.  ( 2 min )

The 2022 National Defense Strategy of the United States listed climate change as a serious threat to national security. Climate intervention methods, such as stratospheric aerosol injection, have been proposed as mitigation strategies, but the downstream effects of such actions on a complex climate system are not well understood. The development of algorithmic techniques for quantifying relationships between source and impact variables related to a climate event (i.e., a climate pathway) would help inform policy decisions. Data-driven deep learning models have become powerful tools for modeling highly nonlinear relationships and may provide a route to characterize climate variable relationships. In this paper, we explore the use of an echo state network (ESN) for characterizing climate pathways. ESNs are a computationally efficient neural network variation designed for temporal data, and recent work proposes ESNs as a useful tool for forecasting spatio-temporal climate data. Like other neural networks, ESNs are non-interpretable black-box models, which poses a hurdle for understanding variable relationships. We address this issue by developing feature importance methods for ESNs in the context of spatio-temporal data to quantify variable relationships captured by the model. We conduct a simulation study to assess and compare the feature importance techniques, and we demonstrate the approach on reanalysis climate data. In the climate application, we select a time period that includes the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo. This event was a significant stratospheric aerosol injection, which we use as a proxy for an artificial stratospheric aerosol injection. Using the proposed approach, we are able to characterize relationships between pathway variables associated with this event.  ( 3 min )

Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is: exploiting the current knowledge of the environment to maximize the cumulative reward as well as exploring actions that allow improving the knowledge of the environment, hopefully leading to higher reward values (exploration-exploitation trade-off). Concurrently, another relevant issue regards the full observability of the states, which may not be assumed in all applications. Such as when only 2D images are considered as input in a RL approach used for finding the optimal action within a 3D simulation environment. In this work, we address these issues by deploying and testing several techniques to balance exploration and exploitation trade-off on partially observable systems for predicting steering wheels in autonomous driving scenario. More precisely, the final aim is to investigate the effects of using both stochastic and deterministic multi-armed bandit strategies coupled with a Deep Recurrent Q-Network. Additionally, we adapted and evaluated the impact of an innovative method to improve the learning phase of the underlying Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network. We aim to show that adaptive stochastic methods for exploration better approximate the trade-off between exploration and exploitation as, in general, Softmax and Max-Boltzmann strategies are able to outperform epsilon-greedy techniques.  ( 2 min )

Matrix-variate distributions are a recent addition to the model-based clustering field, thereby making it possible to analyze data in matrix form with complex structure such as images and time series. Due to its recent appearance, there is limited literature on matrix-variate data, with even less on dealing with outliers in these models. An approach for clustering matrix-variate normal data with outliers is discussed. The approach, which uses the distribution of subset log-likelihoods, extends the OCLUST algorithm to matrix-variate normal data and uses an iterative approach to detect and trim outliers.  ( 2 min )

Interpretable policy learning seeks to estimate intelligible decision policies from observed actions; however, existing models fall short by forcing a tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability. This tradeoff limits data-driven interpretations of human decision-making process. e.g. to audit medical decisions for biases and suboptimal practices, we require models of decision processes which provide concise descriptions of complex behaviors. Fundamentally, existing approaches are burdened by this tradeoff because they represent the underlying decision process as a universal policy, when in fact human decisions are dynamic and can change drastically with contextual information. Thus, we propose Contextualized Policy Recovery (CPR), which re-frames the problem of modeling complex decision processes as a multi-task learning problem in which complex decision policies are comprised of context-specific policies. CPR models each context-specific policy as a linear observation-to-action mapping, and generates new decision models $\textit{on-demand}$ as contexts are updated with new observations. CPR is compatible with fully offline and partially observable decision environments, and can be tailored to incorporate any recurrent black-box model or interpretable decision model. We assess CPR through studies on simulated and real data, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the canonical tasks of predicting antibiotic prescription in intensive care units ($+22\%$ AUROC vs. previous SOTA) and predicting MRI prescription for Alzheimer's patients ($+7.7\%$ AUROC vs. previous SOTA). With this improvement in predictive performance, CPR closes the accuracy gap between interpretable and black-box methods for policy learning, allowing high-resolution exploration and analysis of context-specific decision models.  ( 3 min )

Larger and deeper networks generalise well despite their increased capacity to overfit. Understanding why this happens is theoretically and practically important. One recent approach looks at the infinitely wide limits of such networks and their corresponding kernels. However, these theoretical tools cannot fully explain finite networks as the empirical kernel changes significantly during gradient-descent-based training in contrast to infinite networks. In this work, we derive an iterative linearised training method as a novel empirical tool to further investigate this distinction, allowing us to control for sparse (i.e. infrequent) feature updates and quantify the frequency of feature learning needed to achieve comparable performance. We justify iterative linearisation as an interpolation between a finite analog of the infinite width regime, which does not learn features, and standard gradient descent training, which does. Informally, we also show that it is analogous to a damped version of the Gauss-Newton algorithm -- a second-order method. We show that in a variety of cases, iterative linearised training surprisingly performs on par with standard training, noting in particular how much less frequent feature learning is required to achieve comparable performance. We also show that feature learning is essential for good performance. Since such feature learning inevitably causes changes in the NTK kernel, we provide direct negative evidence for the NTK theory, which states the NTK kernel remains constant during training.  ( 3 min )

Theoretical studies on transfer learning or domain adaptation have so far focused on situations with a known hypothesis class or model; however in practice, some amount of model selection is usually involved, often appearing under the umbrella term of hyperparameter-tuning: for example, one may think of the problem of tuning for the right neural network architecture towards a target task, while leveraging data from a related source task. Now, in addition to the usual tradeoffs on approximation vs estimation errors involved in model selection, this problem brings in a new complexity term, namely, the transfer distance between source and target distributions, which is known to vary with the choice of hypothesis class. We present a first study of this problem, focusing on classification; in particular, the analysis reveals some remarkable phenomena: adaptive rates, i.e., those achievable with no distributional information, can be arbitrarily slower than oracle rates, i.e., when given knowledge on distances.  ( 2 min )

Feature learning is thought to be one of the fundamental reasons for the success of deep neural networks. It is rigorously known that in two-layer fully-connected neural networks under certain conditions, one step of gradient descent on the first layer followed by ridge regression on the second layer can lead to feature learning; characterized by the appearance of a separated rank-one component -- spike -- in the spectrum of the feature matrix. However, with a constant gradient descent step size, this spike only carries information from the linear component of the target function and therefore learning non-linear components is impossible. We show that with a learning rate that grows with the sample size, such training in fact introduces multiple rank-one components, each corresponding to a specific polynomial feature. We further prove that the limiting large-dimensional and large sample training and test errors of the updated neural networks are fully characterized by these spikes. By precisely analyzing the improvement in the loss, we demonstrate that these non-linear features can enhance learning.  ( 2 min )

We propose an approach utilizing gamma-distributed random variables, coupled with log-Gaussian modeling, to generate synthetic datasets suitable for training neural networks. This addresses the challenge of limited real observations in various applications. We apply this methodology to both Raman and coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) spectra, using experimental spectra to estimate gamma process parameters. Parameter estimation is performed using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, yielding a full Bayesian posterior distribution for the model which can be sampled for synthetic data generation. Additionally, we model the additive and multiplicative background functions for Raman and CARS with Gaussian processes. We train two Bayesian neural networks to estimate parameters of the gamma process which can then be used to estimate the underlying Raman spectrum and simultaneously provide uncertainty through the estimation of parameters of a probability distribution. We apply the trained Bayesian neural networks to experimental Raman spectra of phthalocyanine blue, aniline black, naphthol red, and red 264 pigments and also to experimental CARS spectra of adenosine phosphate, fructose, glucose, and sucrose. The results agree with deterministic point estimates for the underlying Raman and CARS spectral signatures.  ( 2 min )

In this work, we present an approach to construct a video-based robot policy capable of reliably executing diverse tasks across different robots and environments from few video demonstrations without using any action annotations. Our method leverages images as a task-agnostic representation, encoding both the state and action information, and text as a general representation for specifying robot goals. By synthesizing videos that ``hallucinate'' robot executing actions and in combination with dense correspondences between frames, our approach can infer the closed-formed action to execute to an environment without the need of any explicit action labels. This unique capability allows us to train the policy solely based on RGB videos and deploy learned policies to various robotic tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in learning policies on table-top manipulation and navigation tasks. Additionally, we contribute an open-source framework for efficient video modeling, enabling the training of high-fidelity policy models with four GPUs within a single day.  ( 2 min )

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have demonstrated exceptional synthesis outcomes across various tasks. However, the current design landscape of the forward diffusion process remains largely untapped and often relies on physical heuristics or simplifying assumptions. Utilizing insights from the development of scalable Bayesian posterior samplers, we present a complete recipe for formulating forward processes in SGMs, ensuring convergence to the desired target distribution. Our approach reveals that several existing SGMs can be seen as specific manifestations of our framework. Building upon this method, we introduce Phase Space Langevin Diffusion (PSLD), which relies on score-based modeling within an augmented space enriched by auxiliary variables akin to physical phase space. Empirical results exhibit the superior sample quality and improved speed-quality trade-off of PSLD compared to various competing approaches on established image synthesis benchmarks. Remarkably, PSLD achieves sample quality akin to state-of-the-art SGMs (FID: 2.10 for unconditional CIFAR-10 generation). Lastly, we demonstrate the applicability of PSLD in conditional synthesis using pre-trained score networks, offering an appealing alternative as an SGM backbone for future advancements. Code and model checkpoints can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/mandt-lab/PSLD}.  ( 2 min )

In data-driven optimization, sample average approximation (SAA) is known to suffer from the so-called optimizer's curse that causes an over-optimistic evaluation of the solution performance. We argue that a special type of distributionallly robust optimization (DRO) formulation offers theoretical advantages in correcting for this optimizer's curse compared to simple ``margin'' adjustments to SAA and other DRO approaches: It attains a statistical bound on the out-of-sample performance, for a wide class of objective functions and distributions, that is nearly tightest in terms of exponential decay rate. This DRO uses an ambiguity set based on a Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence smoothed by the Wasserstein or L\'evy-Prokhorov (LP) distance via a suitable distance optimization. Computationally, we also show that such a DRO, and its generalized versions using smoothed $f$-divergence, are not harder than DRO problems based on $f$-divergence or Wasserstein distances, rendering our DRO formulations both statistically optimal and computationally viable.  ( 2 min )

Sparse logistic regression is for classification and feature selection simultaneously. Although many studies have been done to solve $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression, there is no equivalently abundant work on solving sparse logistic regression with nonconvex regularization term. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to solve $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression, which can be naturally extended to nonconvex regularization term, as long as certain requirement is satisfied. In addition, we also utilize a different line search criteria to guarantee monotone convergence for various regularization terms. Empirical experiments on binary classification tasks with real-world datasets demonstrate our proposed algorithms are capable of performing classification and feature selection effectively at a lower computational cost.  ( 2 min )

Learning rate schedules used in practice bear little resemblance to those recommended by theory. We close much of this theory/practice gap, and as a consequence are able to derive new problem-adaptive learning rate schedules. Our key technical contribution is a refined analysis of learning rate schedules for a wide class of optimization algorithms (including SGD). In contrast to most prior works that study the convergence of the average iterate, we study the last iterate, which is what most people use in practice. When considering only worst-case analysis, our theory predicts that the best choice is the linear decay schedule: a popular choice in practice that sets the stepsize proportionally to $1 - t/T$, where $t$ is the current iteration and $T$ is the total number of steps. To go beyond this worst-case analysis, we use the observed gradient norms to derive schedules refined for any particular task. These refined schedules exhibit learning rate warm-up and rapid learning rate annealing near the end of training. Ours is the first systematic approach to automatically yield both of these properties. We perform the most comprehensive evaluation of learning rate schedules to date, evaluating across 10 diverse deep learning problems, a series of LLMs, and a suite of logistic regression problems. We validate that overall, the linear-decay schedule matches or outperforms all commonly used default schedules including cosine annealing, and that our schedule refinement method gives further improvements.  ( 3 min )

This paper focuses on the problem of Differentially Private Stochastic Optimization for (multi-layer) fully connected neural networks with a single output node. In the first part, we examine cases with no hidden nodes, specifically focusing on Generalized Linear Models (GLMs). We investigate the well-specific model where the random noise possesses a zero mean, and the link function is both bounded and Lipschitz continuous. We propose several algorithms and our analysis demonstrates the feasibility of achieving an excess population risk that remains invariant to the data dimension. We also delve into the scenario involving the ReLU link function, and our findings mirror those of the bounded link function. We conclude this section by contrasting well-specified and misspecified models, using ReLU regression as a representative example. In the second part of the paper, we extend our ideas to two-layer neural networks with sigmoid or ReLU activation functions in the well-specified model. In the third part, we study the theoretical guarantees of DP-SGD in Abadi et al. (2016) for fully connected multi-layer neural networks. By utilizing recent advances in Neural Tangent Kernel theory, we provide the first excess population risk when both the sample size and the width of the network are sufficiently large. Additionally, we discuss the role of some parameters in DP-SGD regarding their utility, both theoretically and empirically.  ( 2 min )

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extremely successful in generating samples, from seemingly high dimensional probability measures. However, these methods struggle to capture the temporal dependence of joint probability distributions induced by time-series data. Furthermore, long time-series data streams hugely increase the dimension of the target space, which may render generative modelling infeasible. To overcome these challenges, motivated by the autoregressive models in econometric, we are interested in the conditional distribution of future time series given the past information. We propose the generic conditional Sig-WGAN framework by integrating Wasserstein-GANs (WGANs) with mathematically principled and efficient path feature extraction called the signature of a path. The signature of a path is a graded sequence of statistics that provides a universal description for a stream of data, and its expected value characterises the law of the time-series model. In particular, we develop the conditional Sig-$W_1$ metric, that captures the conditional joint law of time series models, and use it as a discriminator. The signature feature space enables the explicit representation of the proposed discriminators which alleviates the need for expensive training. We validate our method on both synthetic and empirical dataset and observe that our method consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks with respect to measures of similarity and predictive ability.  ( 3 min )

This study proposes an interpretable neural network-based non-proportional odds model (N$^3$POM) for ordinal regression. N$^3$POM is different from conventional approaches to ordinal regression with non-proportional models in several ways: (1) N$^3$POM is designed to directly handle continuous responses, whereas standard methods typically treat de facto ordered continuous variables as discrete, (2) instead of estimating response-dependent finite coefficients of linear models from discrete responses as is done in conventional approaches, we train a non-linear neural network to serve as a coefficient function. Thanks to the neural network, N$^3$POM offers flexibility while preserving the interpretability of conventional ordinal regression. We establish a sufficient condition under which the predicted conditional cumulative probability locally satisfies the monotonicity constraint over a user-specified region in the covariate space. Additionally, we provide a monotonicity-preserving stochastic (MPS) algorithm for effectively training the neural network. We apply N$^3$POM to several real-world datasets.  ( 2 min )

Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) are a popular family of continuous-depth deep learning models. In this work, we consider a large family of parameterized ODEs with continuous-in-time parameters, which include time-dependent neural ODEs. We derive a generalization bound for this class by a Lipschitz-based argument. By leveraging the analogy between neural ODEs and deep residual networks, our approach yields in particular a generalization bound for a class of deep residual networks. The bound involves the magnitude of the difference between successive weight matrices. We illustrate numerically how this quantity affects the generalization capability of neural networks.  ( 2 min )

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning due to model overconfidence, often without awareness of their epistemological limits. We hypothesize that ``neural collapse'', a phenomenon affecting in-distribution data for models trained beyond loss convergence, also influences OOD data. To benefit from this interplay, we introduce NECO, a novel post-hoc method for OOD detection, which leverages the geometric properties of ``neural collapse'' and of principal component spaces to identify OOD data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NECO achieves state-of-the-art results on both small and large-scale OOD detection tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across different network architectures. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of our method in OOD detection. We plan to release the code after the anonymity period.  ( 2 min )

Existing regression models tend to fall short in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation when the label distribution is imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression (VIR), which not only performs well in imbalanced regression but naturally produces reasonable uncertainty estimation as a byproduct. Different from typical variational autoencoders assuming I.I.D. representations (a data point's representation is not directly affected by other data points), our VIR borrows data with similar regression labels to compute the latent representation's variational distribution; furthermore, different from deterministic regression models producing point estimates, VIR predicts the entire normal-inverse-gamma distributions and modulates the associated conjugate distributions to impose probabilistic reweighting on the imbalanced data, thereby providing better uncertainty estimation. Experiments in several real-world datasets show that our VIR can outperform state-of-the-art imbalanced regression models in terms of both accuracy and uncertainty estimation. Code will soon be available at \url{https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/variational-imbalanced-regression}.  ( 2 min )

Surrogate Optimization (SO) algorithms have shown promise for optimizing expensive black-box functions. However, their performance is heavily influenced by hyperparameters related to sampling and surrogate fitting, which poses a challenge to their widespread adoption. We investigate the impact of hyperparameters on various SO algorithms and propose a Hyperparameter Adaptive Search for SO (HASSO) approach. HASSO is not a hyperparameter tuning algorithm, but a generic self-adjusting SO algorithm that dynamically tunes its own hyperparameters while concurrently optimizing the primary objective function, without requiring additional evaluations. The aim is to improve the accessibility, effectiveness, and convergence speed of SO algorithms for practitioners. Our approach identifies and modifies the most influential hyperparameters specific to each problem and SO approach, reducing the need for manual tuning without significantly increasing the computational burden. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HASSO in enhancing the performance of various SO algorithms across different global optimization test problems.  ( 2 min )

In 1-bit compressed sensing, the aim is to estimate a $k$-sparse unit vector $x\in S^{n-1}$ within an $\epsilon$ error (in $\ell_2$) from minimal number of linear measurements that are quantized to just their signs, i.e., from measurements of the form $y = \mathrm{Sign}(\langle a, x\rangle).$ In this paper, we study a noisy version where a fraction of the measurements can be flipped, potentially by an adversary. In particular, we analyze the Binary Iterative Hard Thresholding (BIHT) algorithm, a proximal gradient descent on a properly defined loss function used for 1-bit compressed sensing, in this noisy setting. It is known from recent results that, with $\tilde{O}(\frac{k}{\epsilon})$ noiseless measurements, BIHT provides an estimate within $\epsilon$ error. This result is optimal and universal, meaning one set of measurements work for all sparse vectors. In this paper, we show that BIHT also provides better results than all known methods for the noisy setting. We show that when up to $\tau$-fraction of the sign measurements are incorrect (adversarial error), with the same number of measurements as before, BIHT agnostically provides an estimate of $x$ within an $\tilde{O}(\epsilon+\tau)$ error, maintaining the universality of measurements. This establishes stability of iterative hard thresholding in the presence of measurement error. To obtain the result, we use the restricted approximate invertibility of Gaussian matrices, as well as a tight analysis of the high-dimensional geometry of the adversarially corrupted measurements.  ( 3 min )

Hierarchical time series are common in several applied fields. The forecasts for these time series are required to be coherent, that is, to satisfy the constraints given by the hierarchy. The most popular technique to enforce coherence is called reconciliation, which adjusts the base forecasts computed for each time series. However, recent works on probabilistic reconciliation present several limitations. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on conditioning to reconcile any type of forecast distribution. We then introduce a new algorithm, called Bottom-Up Importance Sampling, to efficiently sample from the reconciled distribution. It can be used for any base forecast distribution: discrete, continuous, or in the form of samples, providing a major speedup compared to the current methods. Experiments on several temporal hierarchies show a significant improvement over base probabilistic forecasts.  ( 2 min )

In practice, deep neural networks are often able to easily interpolate their training data. To understand this phenomenon, many works have aimed to quantify the memorization capacity of a neural network architecture: the largest number of points such that the architecture can interpolate any placement of these points with any assignment of labels. For real-world data, however, one intuitively expects the presence of a benign structure so that interpolation already occurs at a smaller network size than suggested by memorization capacity. In this paper, we investigate interpolation by adopting an instance-specific viewpoint. We introduce a simple randomized algorithm that, given a fixed finite dataset with two classes, with high probability constructs an interpolating three-layer neural network in polynomial time. The required number of parameters is linked to geometric properties of the two classes and their mutual arrangement. As a result, we obtain guarantees that are independent of the number of samples and hence move beyond worst-case memorization capacity bounds. We illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm in non-pathological situations with extensive numerical experiments and link the insights back to the theoretical results.  ( 2 min )

Many causal estimands are only partially identifiable since they depend on the unobservable joint distribution between potential outcomes. Stratification on pretreatment covariates can yield sharper partial identification bounds; however, unless the covariates are discrete with relatively small support, this approach typically requires consistent estimation of the conditional distributions of the potential outcomes given the covariates. Thus, existing approaches may fail under model misspecification or if consistency assumptions are violated. In this study, we propose a unified and model-agnostic inferential approach for a wide class of partially identified estimands, based on duality theory for optimal transport problems. In randomized experiments, our approach can wrap around any estimates of the conditional distributions and provide uniformly valid inference, even if the initial estimates are arbitrarily inaccurate. Also, our approach is doubly robust in observational studies. Notably, this property allows analysts to use the multiplier bootstrap to select covariates and models without sacrificing validity even if the true model is not included. Furthermore, if the conditional distributions are estimated at semiparametric rates, our approach matches the performance of an oracle with perfect knowledge of the outcome model. Finally, we propose an efficient computational framework, enabling implementation on many practical problems in causal inference.  ( 2 min )

Motivated by the computational difficulties incurred by popular deep learning algorithms for the generative modeling of temporal densities, we propose a cheap alternative which requires minimal hyperparameter tuning and scales favorably to high dimensional problems. In particular, we use a projection-based optimal transport solver [Meng et al., 2019] to join successive samples and subsequently use transport splines [Chewi et al., 2020] to interpolate the evolving density. When the sampling frequency is sufficiently high, the optimal maps are close to the identity and are thus computationally efficient to compute. Moreover, the training process is highly parallelizable as all optimal maps are independent and can thus be learned simultaneously. Finally, the approach is based solely on numerical linear algebra rather than minimizing a nonconvex objective function, allowing us to easily analyze and control the algorithm. We present several numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the efficiency of our method. In particular, these experiments show that the proposed approach is highly competitive compared with state-of-the-art normalizing flows conditioned on time across a wide range of dimensionalities.  ( 3 min )

We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions of state-action features. This class is known to be more general than linear MDPs, where the transition kernel and the reward function are assumed to be linear functions of the feature vectors. As our first contribution, we show that the difference between the two classes is the presence of states in linearly $q^\pi$-realizable MDPs where for any policy, all the actions have approximately equal values, and skipping over these states by following an arbitrarily fixed policy in those states transforms the problem to a linear MDP. Based on this observation, we derive a novel (computationally inefficient) learning algorithm for linearly $q^\pi$-realizable MDPs that simultaneously learns what states should be skipped over and runs another learning algorithm on the linear MDP hidden in the problem. The method returns an $\epsilon$-optimal policy after $\text{polylog}(H, d)/\epsilon^2$ interactions with the MDP, where $H$ is the time horizon and $d$ is the dimension of the feature vectors, giving the first polynomial-sample-complexity online RL algorithm for this setting. The results are proved for the misspecified case, where the sample complexity is shown to degrade gracefully with the misspecification error.  ( 3 min )

Regression on manifolds, and, more broadly, statistics on manifolds, has garnered significant importance in recent years due to the vast number of applications for this type of data. Circular data is a classic example, but so is data in the space of covariance matrices, data on the Grassmannian manifold obtained as a result of principal component analysis, among many others. In this work we investigate prediction sets for regression scenarios when the response variable, denoted by $Y$, resides in a manifold, and the covariable, denoted by X, lies in Euclidean space. This extends the concepts delineated in [Lei and Wasserman, 2014] to this novel context. Aligning with traditional principles in conformal inference, these prediction sets are distribution-free, indicating that no specific assumptions are imposed on the joint distribution of $(X, Y)$, and they maintain a non-parametric character. We prove the asymptotic almost sure convergence of the empirical version of these regions on the manifold to their population counterparts. The efficiency of this method is shown through a comprehensive simulation study and an analysis involving real-world data.  ( 2 min )

Maximum-type statistics of certain functions of the sample covariance matrix of high-dimensional vector time series are studied to statistically confirm or reject the null hypothesis that a data set has been collected under normal conditions. The approach generalizes the case of the maximal deviation of the sample autocovariances function from its assumed values. Within a linear time series framework it is shown that Gumbel-type extreme value asymptotics holds true. As applications we discuss long-only mimimal-variance portfolio optimization and subportfolio analysis with respect to idiosyncratic risks, ETF index tracking by sparse tracking portfolios, convolutional deep learners for image analysis and the analysis of array-of-sensors data.  ( 2 min )

The growing interest in machine learning problems over graphs with additional node information such as texts, images, or labels has popularized methods that require the costly operation of processing the entire graph. Yet, little effort has been made to the development of fast local methods (i.e. without accessing the entire graph) that extract useful information from such data. To that end, we propose a study of local graph clustering using noisy node labels as a proxy for additional node information. In this setting, nodes receive initial binary labels based on cluster affiliation: 1 if they belong to the target cluster and 0 otherwise. Subsequently, a fraction of these labels is flipped. We investigate the benefits of incorporating noisy labels for local graph clustering. By constructing a weighted graph with such labels, we study the performance of graph diffusion-based local clustering method on both the original and the weighted graphs. From a theoretical perspective, we consider recovering an unknown target cluster with a single seed node in a random graph with independent noisy node labels. We provide sufficient conditions on the label noise under which, with high probability, using diffusion in the weighted graph yields a more accurate recovery of the target cluster. This approach proves more effective than using the given labels alone or using diffusion in the label-free original graph. Empirically, we show that reliable node labels can be obtained with just a few samples from an attributed graph. Moreover, utilizing these labels via diffusion in the weighted graph leads to significantly better local clustering performance across several real-world datasets, improving F1 scores by up to 13%.  ( 3 min )

Large language models such as ChatGPT are increasingly explored in medical domains. However, the absence of standard guidelines for performance evaluation has led to methodological inconsistencies. This study aims to summarize the available evidence on evaluating ChatGPT's performance in medicine and provide direction for future research. We searched ten medical literature databases on June 15, 2023, using the keyword "ChatGPT". A total of 3520 articles were identified, of which 60 were reviewed and summarized in this paper and 17 were included in the meta-analysis. The analysis showed that ChatGPT displayed an overall integrated accuracy of 56% (95% CI: 51%-60%, I2 = 87%) in addressing medical queries. However, the studies varied in question resource, question-asking process, and evaluation metrics. Moreover, many studies failed to report methodological details, including the version of ChatGPT and whether each question was used independently or repeatedly. Our findings revealed that although ChatGPT demonstrated considerable potential for application in healthcare, the heterogeneity of the studies and insufficient reporting may affect the reliability of these results. Further well-designed studies with comprehensive and transparent reporting are needed to evaluate ChatGPT's performance in medicine.  ( 2 min )

Multiple data views measured on the same set of participants is becoming more common and has the potential to deepen our understanding of many complex diseases by analyzing these different views simultaneously. Equally important, many of these complex diseases show evidence of subgroup heterogeneity (e.g., by sex or race). HIP (Heterogeneity in Integration and Prediction) is among the first methods proposed to integrate multiple data views while also accounting for subgroup heterogeneity to identify common and subgroup-specific markers of a particular disease. However, HIP is applicable to continuous outcomes and requires programming expertise by the user. Here we propose extensions to HIP that accommodate multi-class, Poisson, and Zero-Inflated Poisson outcomes while retaining the benefits of HIP. Additionally, we introduce an R Shiny application, accessible on shinyapps.io at https://multi-viewlearn.shinyapps.io/HIP_ShinyApp/, that provides an interface with the Python implementation of HIP to allow more researchers to use the method anywhere and on any device. We applied HIP to identify genes and proteins common and specific to males and females that are associated with exacerbation frequency. Although some of the identified genes and proteins show evidence of a relationship with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in existing literature, others may be candidates for future research investigating their relationship with COPD. We demonstrate the use of the Shiny application with a publicly available data. An R-package for HIP would be made available at https://github.com/lasandrall/HIP.  ( 3 min )

Lion (Evolved Sign Momentum), a new optimizer discovered through program search, has shown promising results in training large AI models. It performs comparably or favorably to AdamW but with greater memory efficiency. As we can expect from the results of a random search program, Lion incorporates elements from several existing algorithms, including signed momentum, decoupled weight decay, Polak, and Nesterov momentum, but does not fit into any existing category of theoretically grounded optimizers. Thus, even though Lion appears to perform well as a general-purpose optimizer for a wide range of tasks, its theoretical basis remains uncertain. This lack of theoretical clarity limits opportunities to further enhance and expand Lion's efficacy. This work aims to demystify Lion. Based on both continuous-time and discrete-time analysis, we demonstrate that Lion is a theoretically novel and principled approach for minimizing a general loss function $f(x)$ while enforcing a bound constraint $\|x\|_\infty \leq 1/\lambda$. Lion achieves this through the incorporation of decoupled weight decay, where $\lambda$ represents the weight decay coefficient. Our analysis is made possible by the development of a new Lyapunov function for the Lion updates. It applies to a broader family of Lion-$\kappa$ algorithms, where the $\text{sign}(\cdot)$ operator in Lion is replaced by the subgradient of a convex function $\kappa$, leading to the solution of a general composite optimization problem of $\min_x f(x) + \kappa^*(x)$. Our findings provide valuable insights into the dynamics of Lion and pave the way for further improvements and extensions of Lion-related algorithms.  ( 3 min )

Large transformer models pretrained on offline reinforcement learning datasets have demonstrated remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, where they can make good decisions when prompted with interaction trajectories from unseen environments. However, when and how transformers can be trained to perform ICRL have not been theoretically well-understood. In particular, it is unclear which reinforcement-learning algorithms transformers can perform in context, and how distribution mismatch in offline training data affects the learned algorithms. This paper provides a theoretical framework that analyzes supervised pretraining for ICRL. This includes two recently proposed training methods -- algorithm distillation and decision-pretrained transformers. First, assuming model realizability, we prove the supervised-pretrained transformer will imitate the conditional expectation of the expert algorithm given the observed trajectory. The generalization error will scale with model capacity and a distribution divergence factor between the expert and offline algorithms. Second, we show transformers with ReLU attention can efficiently approximate near-optimal online reinforcement learning algorithms like LinUCB and Thompson sampling for stochastic linear bandits, and UCB-VI for tabular Markov decision processes. This provides the first quantitative analysis of the ICRL capabilities of transformers pretrained from offline trajectories.  ( 2 min )

We consider the variable selection problem for two-sample tests, aiming to select the most informative variables to distinguish samples from two groups. To solve this problem, we propose a framework based on the kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). Our approach seeks a group of variables with a pre-specified size that maximizes the variance-regularized MMD statistics. This formulation also corresponds to the minimization of asymptotic type-II error while controlling type-I error, as studied in the literature. We present mixed-integer programming formulations and develop exact and approximation algorithms with performance guarantees for different choices of kernel functions. Furthermore, we provide a statistical testing power analysis of our proposed framework. Experiment results on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.  ( 2 min )

We present a simulation strategy for the real-time dynamics of quantum fields, inspired by reinforcement learning. It builds on the complex Langevin approach, which it amends with system specific prior information, a necessary prerequisite to overcome this exceptionally severe sign problem. The optimization process underlying our machine learning approach is made possible by deploying inherently stable solvers of the complex Langevin stochastic process and a novel optimality criterion derived from insight into so-called boundary terms. This conceptual and technical progress allows us to both significantly extend the range of real-time simulations in 1+1d scalar field theory beyond the state-of-the-art and to avoid discretization artifacts that plagued previous real-time field theory simulations. Limitations of and promising future directions are discussed.  ( 2 min )

We consider the problem of model selection in a high-dimensional sparse linear regression model under the differential privacy framework. In particular, we consider the problem of differentially private best subset selection and study its utility guarantee. We adopt the well-known exponential mechanism for selecting the best model, and under a certain margin condition, we establish its strong model recovery property. However, the exponential search space of the exponential mechanism poses a serious computational bottleneck. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for the sampling step and establish its polynomial mixing time to its stationary distribution in the problem parameters $n,p$, and $s$. Furthermore, we also establish approximate differential privacy for the final estimates of the Metropolis-Hastings random walk using its mixing property. Finally, we also perform some illustrative simulations that echo the theoretical findings of our main results.  ( 2 min )

This paper studies two fundamental problems in regularized Graphon Mean-Field Games (GMFGs). First, we establish the existence of a Nash Equilibrium (NE) of any $\lambda$-regularized GMFG (for $\lambda\geq 0$). This result relies on weaker conditions than those in previous works for analyzing both unregularized GMFGs ($\lambda=0$) and $\lambda$-regularized MFGs, which are special cases of GMFGs. Second, we propose provably efficient algorithms to learn the NE in weakly monotone GMFGs, motivated by Lasry and Lions [2007]. Previous literature either only analyzed continuous-time algorithms or required extra conditions to analyze discrete-time algorithms. In contrast, we design a discrete-time algorithm and derive its convergence rate solely under weakly monotone conditions. Furthermore, we develop and analyze the action-value function estimation procedure during the online learning process, which is absent from algorithms for monotone GMFGs. This serves as a sub-module in our optimization algorithm. The efficiency of the designed algorithm is corroborated by empirical evaluations.  ( 2 min )

Diffusion models suffer from slow sample generation at inference time. Therefore, developing a principled framework for fast deterministic/stochastic sampling for a broader class of diffusion models is a promising direction. We propose two complementary frameworks for accelerating sample generation in pre-trained models: Conjugate Integrators and Splitting Integrators. Conjugate integrators generalize DDIM, mapping the reverse diffusion dynamics to a more amenable space for sampling. In contrast, splitting-based integrators, commonly used in molecular dynamics, reduce the numerical simulation error by cleverly alternating between numerical updates involving the data and auxiliary variables. After extensively studying these methods empirically and theoretically, we present a hybrid method that leads to the best-reported performance for diffusion models in augmented spaces. Applied to Phase Space Langevin Diffusion [Pandey & Mandt, 2023] on CIFAR-10, our deterministic and stochastic samplers achieve FID scores of 2.11 and 2.36 in only 100 network function evaluations (NFE) as compared to 2.57 and 2.63 for the best-performing baselines, respectively. Our code and model checkpoints will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/mandt-lab/PSLD}.  ( 2 min )

Transformers pretrained on diverse tasks exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to solve unseen tasks solely based on input contexts without adjusting model parameters. In this paper, we study ICL in one of its simplest setups: pretraining a linearly parameterized single-layer linear attention model for linear regression with a Gaussian prior. We establish a statistical task complexity bound for the attention model pretraining, showing that effective pretraining only requires a small number of independent tasks. Furthermore, we prove that the pretrained model closely matches the Bayes optimal algorithm, i.e., optimally tuned ridge regression, by achieving nearly Bayes optimal risk on unseen tasks under a fixed context length. These theoretical findings complement prior experimental research and shed light on the statistical foundations of ICL.  ( 2 min )

Obtaining continuously updated predictions is a major challenge for personalised medicine. Leveraging combinations of parametric regressions and machine learning approaches, the personalised online super learner (POSL) can achieve such dynamic and personalised predictions. We adapt POSL to predict a repeated continuous outcome dynamically and propose a new way to validate such personalised or dynamic prediction models. We illustrate its performance by predicting the convection volume of patients undergoing hemodiafiltration. POSL outperformed its candidate learners with respect to median absolute error, calibration-in-the-large, discrimination, and net benefit. We finally discuss the choices and challenges underlying the use of POSL.  ( 2 min )

Many real-world prediction tasks have outcome variables that have characteristic heavy-tail distributions. Examples include copies of books sold, auction prices of art pieces, demand for commodities in warehouses, etc. By learning heavy-tailed distributions, "big and rare" instances (e.g., the best-sellers) will have accurate predictions. Most existing approaches are not dedicated to learning heavy-tailed distribution; thus, they heavily under-predict such instances. To tackle this problem, we introduce Learning to Place (L2P), which exploits the pairwise relationships between instances for learning. In its training phase, L2P learns a pairwise preference classifier: is instance A > instance B? In its placing phase, L2P obtains a prediction by placing the new instance among the known instances. Based on its placement, the new instance is then assigned a value for its outcome variable. Experiments on real data show that L2P outperforms competing approaches in terms of accuracy and ability to reproduce heavy-tailed outcome distribution. In addition, L2P provides an interpretable model by placing each predicted instance in relation to its comparable neighbors. Interpretable models are highly desirable when lives and treasure are at stake.  ( 3 min )

Across a wide array of disciplines, many researchers use machine learning (ML) algorithms to identify a subgroup of individuals, called exceptional responders, who are likely to be helped by a treatment the most. A common approach consists of two steps. One first estimates the conditional average treatment effect or its proxy using an ML algorithm. They then determine the cutoff of the resulting treatment prioritization score to select those predicted to benefit most from the treatment. Unfortunately, these estimated treatment prioritization scores are often biased and noisy. Furthermore, utilizing the same data to both choose a cutoff value and estimate the average treatment effect among the selected individuals suffer from a multiple testing problem. To address these challenges, we develop a uniform confidence band for experimentally evaluating the sorted average treatment effect (GATES) among the individuals whose treatment prioritization score is at least as high as any given quantile value, regardless of how the quantile is chosen. This provides a statistical guarantee that the GATES for the selected subgroup exceeds a certain threshold. The validity of the proposed methodology depends solely on randomization of treatment and random sampling of units without requiring modeling assumptions or resampling methods. This widens its applicability including a wide range of other causal quantities. A simulation study shows that the empirical coverage of the proposed uniform confidence bands is close to the nominal coverage when the sample is as small as 100. We analyze a clinical trial of late-stage prostate cancer and find a relatively large proportion of exceptional responders with a statistical performance guarantee.  ( 3 min )

Covariate shift occurs prevalently in practice, where the input distributions of the source and target data are substantially different. Despite its practical importance in various learning problems, most of the existing methods only focus on some specific learning tasks and are not well validated theoretically and numerically. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified analysis of general nonparametric methods in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) under covariate shift. Our theoretical results are established for a general loss belonging to a rich loss function family, which includes many commonly used methods as special cases, such as mean regression, quantile regression, likelihood-based classification, and margin-based classification. Two types of covariate shift problems are the focus of this paper and the sharp convergence rates are established for a general loss function to provide a unified theoretical analysis, which concurs with the optimal results in literature where the squared loss is used. Extensive numerical studies on synthetic and real examples confirm our theoretical findings and further illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.  ( 2 min )

We characterize the statistical efficiency of knowledge transfer through $n$ samples from a teacher to a probabilistic student classifier with input space $\mathcal S$ over labels $\mathcal A$. We show that privileged information at three progressive levels accelerates the transfer. At the first level, only samples with hard labels are known, via which the maximum likelihood estimator attains the minimax rate $\sqrt{{|{\mathcal S}||{\mathcal A}|}/{n}}$. The second level has the teacher probabilities of sampled labels available in addition, which turns out to boost the convergence rate lower bound to ${{|{\mathcal S}||{\mathcal A}|}/{n}}$. However, under this second data acquisition protocol, minimizing a naive adaptation of the cross-entropy loss results in an asymptotically biased student. We overcome this limitation and achieve the fundamental limit by using a novel empirical variant of the squared error logit loss. The third level further equips the student with the soft labels (complete logits) on ${\mathcal A}$ given every sampled input, thereby provably enables the student to enjoy a rate ${|{\mathcal S}|}/{n}$ free of $|{\mathcal A}|$. We find any Kullback-Leibler divergence minimizer to be optimal in the last case. Numerical simulations distinguish the four learners and corroborate our theory.  ( 2 min )

i am trying to detect code segments in a text response of an LLM, so i can highlight them using Highlight,JS, ​ is there a good model that can do the classification of a block of text and decide if it is a block of code or a block of NLP simple text (english) ? submitted by /u/Particular_Flower_12 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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News provided by aibrews.com Researchers present LLark: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Music - an open-source instruction-tuned multimodal model for music understanding. LLark is trained entirely from open-source music data and models [Demo | Paper] Researchers released LLaVA-1.5. LLaVA (Large Language and Vision Assistant) is an open-source large multimodal model that combines a vision encoder and Vicuna for general-purpose visual and language understanding. LLaVA-1.5 achieved SoTA on 11 benchmarks, with just simple modifications to the original LLaVA and completed training in ~1 day on a single 8-A100 node [Demo | Paper | GitHub]. Voice AI platform ElevenLabs released AI Dubbing tool that enables users to automatically translate any audio in a video into a different language whil…

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to a significant increase in global electricity consumption, according to a peer-reviewed analysis published in Joule. The analysis estimates that if current trends continue, AI could drive the demand for electricity in data centers to consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours annually, which is more than what many small countries use in a year. AI is energy-intensive, with both the training and inference phases requiring a significant amount of energy. The size of AI models, such as large language models, and the location of data centers also contribute to energy usage. Factors such as cooling requirements and the type of hardware used can impact energy consumption. Source : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ai-boom-could-use-a-shocking-amount-of-electricity/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Today's conversational bots like Claude and GPT can chat impressively but aren't great at complex planning or executing technical tasks. To overcome this, new research from HKU builds open-source AI agents that blend natural language and coding skills. They're called Lemur and Lemur-Chat. The researchers think achieving versatile real-world agents requires models that integrate both fluid natural language abilities and precise programming language control. Humans combine plain speech for higher-level goals with languages like Python when we need to plan intricately and execute exactly. AI needs both capacities too. But most existing models specialize in pure language or pure code. There's a separation that is limiting. The team created Lemur by pretraining the open-source Llama-2 on a massive mixed corpus with 10x more natural language than code. This improved its programming abilities while retaining conversational strength. Further instruction tuning optimized Lemur-Chat for following free-form directions in language. Experiments found Lemur surpassed specialized coding-only models like Codex in overall benchmarks. Lemur-Chat then exceeded Lemur by 15% after instruction tuning. More importantly, Lemur-Chat won 12/13 new "agent tests" designed to mimic real-world challenges needing both language and programming prowess. It beat alternatives at: Using tools like Python and Wikipedia to enhance reasoning Debugging code by leveraging error messages Improving the most from natural language feedback Exploring partially observable environments like cybersecurity and web browsing simulations. Lemur-Chat matched GPT-3.5 in many tests, closing the gap between commercial and open-source agents. TLDR: New open-source AI agents combine coding and language skills. Experiments show the combo unlocks more performance across technical challenges. Full summary is here. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

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In a recent article published in the journal Nature, researchers developed AI Tool EVEscape, a tool to forecast which severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) strains have the highest potential to escape host immunity.[1] Microsoft seems to be working on the possible development of an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can understand and resolve customer support requests using natural language processing.[2] Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) will let you create images right from a text prompt starting Thursday.[3] The Biden administration is considering closing a loophole that gives Chinese companies access to American artificial intelligence (AI) chips through units located overseas, according to four people familiar with the matter.[4] Sources: [1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20231012/EVScape-New-tool-to-forecast-which-SARS-CoV-2-variants-could-dodge-our-immunity.aspx [2] https://winbuzzer.com/2023/10/11/microsoft-gears-up-for-a-revolutionary-natural-language-customer-support-ai-xcxwbn/ [3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/12/23913337/google-ai-powered-search-sge-images-written-drafts [4] https://www.reuters.com/technology/biden-eyes-adding-ai-chip-curbs-chinese-companies-abroad-2023-10-13/ submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]

Also if anyone has anyone who should be a voice actor included in it it can also clone voices. Idk I need to make sure it works for a wide variety of books. As long as they don’t use ‘ for quotes cause the computer getts that confused when “ I’ve “ and such uses the same symbol submitted by /u/Impossible_Belt_7757 [link] [comments]

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ClassifyML is an application for creating specialised image datasets for use with an ML training algorithm. Simply import your chosen images into the app via file manager, drag'n'drop or the on device camera and create your bounding boxes and then export your images and JSON into a structured folder. LINK: https://apps.apple.com/app/classify-ml/id6461013113 https://preview.redd.it/dicsq9d3k1ub1.png?width=313&format=png&auto=webp&s=7976a61f599c658d948dec12db0b8ec93274ad93 https://preview.redd.it/3tswxdd3k1ub1.png?width=313&format=png&auto=webp&s=56ca30546984402f4dbba628b73732918e921758 https://preview.redd.it/y0xelmz3k1ub1.png?width=313&format=png&auto=webp&s=a755ea61bc247c6aacb61a31c700e4e80a1ed69f submitted by /u/LiamRogers99 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Recently I came across Open AI's Spinning Up Project, which seems to be well structured, but quite introductory. What are some resources you use for learning RL? submitted by /u/OwnAd9305 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, I'm looking for an open source LLM that can extract all the characters from an inputted book, and isolate passages with descriptive writing that involves imagery. Can anyone suggest me something? Thanks! submitted by /u/slomorosh [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In this blog, we explore different definitions of “the edge,” and understand the factors driving AI/ML to the edge. We examine why the trends of LLMs and edge computing are intersecting now, and how teams can take advantage of their combined power today. We also demonstrate how LLMs can be used in an edge environment to generate insights for a real-world use case today. Consider a geologist working in a remote oil field who is responsible for building and analyzing 3D models of oil fields to determine production capacity and the impact on profitability. In this demo, we walk through how Code Llama, Chassisml.io, and Modzy could be used to build a dashboard that geologists could use to analyze well data in real-time in a remote, network restricted environment, allowing for LLM insights generated at the edge. Learn more: https://www.modzy.com/modzy-blog/deploy-and-run-llms-at-the-edge submitted by /u/modzykirsten [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

https://openreview.net/group?id=ICLR.cc/2024/Conference submitted by /u/_puhsu [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

I am running AutoTokenizer from transformers on vscode. The vscode crashes showing error and not responding. I don't understand what's wrong. submitted by /u/ArtichokeOne5897 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Hey Guys, ​ I am currently spearheading a project for a client in the insurance industry, with a primary objective being the digitalization of thousands of hardcopy contracts. The ultimate goal is to automatically extract particular information from these newly digital documents, namely "date", "insurance premium", "insurance type", and "contractor's name". However, I anticipate a level of variability in terms of exact terminology used, particularly with regards to "insurance premium" and "insurance type". (There is no handwritten text) ​ I am keen on sharing the methodology I intend to apply for this project and invite your invaluable feedback and suggestions: ​ - Firstly, I'll execute the scanning/digitalization of the documents manually. - Post this, I plan to utilize Tesseract in combination with Python for the extraction of text from the preprocessed images. - I am considering using libraries such as NLTK or spaCy to preprocess this text (this will involve steps like lower casing, removing punctuations, etc.) - Finally, I plan to train a custom model for Named Entity Recognition (NER), to accommodate the potential semantic variations in entity labeling which are specific to entities like "insurance premium" and "insurance type". ​ I would be immensely grateful if I could gain your insights on the above-proposed pipeline - Are there any glaring pitfalls I need to avoid or perhaps some improvements that I could incorporate? Your expert advice can certainly help ensure the success of this venture. ​ Many thanks in anticipation for your time and valuable inputs! submitted by /u/Background_Thanks604 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I work for this database company SingleStore and we are hosting a AI & ML conference in San Francisco on 17th of October, 2023. It is an in-person conference with amazing speakers line-up like Harrison Chase, co-founder and CEO of LangChain and many more. We will have hands-on workshops, swags giveaway and much more. I don't know if it makes sense to share this but I believe it might help some of you near San Francisco to go and meet the industry leaders and network with other data engineering folks. Use my discount coupon code 'PAVAN100OFF' to avail 100% off on the ticket price. (the original ticket price is $199) Get your tickets now! submitted by /u/PavanBelagatti [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Has anyone ever attempted this or finetuning before on the CoreML version? I’m currently trying to and I’m not even sure where to start tbh. CoreML version of Llama 2: https://huggingface.co/coreml-projects/Llama-2-7b-chat-coreml submitted by /u/Inside-Aromatic [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi all, I’m studying the concepts of machine learning. However, I am stuck because I still don’t see how introducing a penalty using lasso regression can drive some parameter coefficients to zero. When doing the calculations, I only get the final value (ordinary least squares + penalty) and don’t directly see a coefficient value being reduced. I've looked at many materials and resources trying to explain this, but I still can't see how it's done. I think the important thing for me is seeing it going to zero or, at the very least, seeing it during calculation. Is there anyone that can help explain this better? Or, If you know of a formula that I can derive that, during the derivation process, shows a coefficient being reduced or set to zero, that would also help. Also, any good resources on the topic would be appreciated. Edit: This post should have been posted in r/learnmachinelearning here is a link to the same post in that subreddit submitted by /u/thismymind [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am an academic and I have some funding. However, I cannot just plug in my lab card with a recurrent payment, procedures don't allow it. Is there a way to "top up" some compute credits on the OpenAI accounts ? Is anyone having the same problem ? Thanks. submitted by /u/Jean-Porte [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, we are working on a project that involves dealing with messy automotive data, and are looking for guidance on possible approaches and tools. We aim to map messy supplier data of car makes/models to standardized values from our approved list. This requires handling various challenges like typos, varied specificity, and sometimes research-based mapping (e.g., using engine size and production year to ascertain a chassis code). eg: If a supplier provides 'BNW 316i saloon 1990-1994', (typo intentional) we would like to match it to our standardized value of 'BMW 3 Series (E36)'. Our old approach has been a combination of utilizing fuzzy matching for typos/basic matching and time consuming manual processing and verification. We have recently experimented with using GPT for providing guess…  ( 10 min )

Today's conversational bots like Claude and GPT can chat impressively but aren't great at complex planning or executing technical tasks. To overcome this, new research from HKU builds open-source AI agents that blend natural language and coding skills. They're called Lemur and Lemur-Chat. The researchers think achieving versatile real-world agents requires models that integrate both fluid natural language abilities and precise programming language control. Humans combine plain speech for higher-level goals with languages like Python when we need to plan intricately and execute exactly. AI needs both capacities too. But most existing models specialize in pure language or pure code. There's a separation that is limiting. The team created Lemur by pretraining the open-source Llama-2 on a massive mixed corpus with 10x more natural language than code. This improved its programming abilities while retaining conversational strength. Further instruction tuning optimized Lemur-Chat for following free-form directions in language. Experiments found Lemur surpassed specialized coding-only models like Codex in overall benchmarks. Lemur-Chat then exceeded Lemur by 15% after instruction tuning. More importantly, Lemur-Chat won 12/13 new "agent tests" designed to mimic real-world challenges needing both language and programming prowess. It beat alternatives at: Using tools like Python and Wikipedia to enhance reasoning Debugging code by leveraging error messages Improving the most from natural language feedback Exploring partially observable environments like cybersecurity and web browsing simulations. Lemur-Chat matched GPT-3.5 in many tests, closing the gap between commercial and open-source agents. TLDR: New open-source AI agents combine coding and language skills. Experiments show the combo unlocks more performance across technical challenges. Full summary is here. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, we've just released a new version of AgileRL, our evolutionary hyperparameter optimisation framework built for RL that is 10x faster than SOTA. We've introduced PPO, Rainbow DQN, some sophisticated replay buffers, and also collaborated with the Farama Foundation to create some tutorials (more on the way). Please check it out and take it for a spin. We're also looking for contributors so get in touch if you would like to be involved! https://github.com/AgileRL/AgileRL submitted by /u/nicku_a [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi everyone, I’m one of the creators of Evidently, an open-source (Apache 2.0) tool for production ML monitoring. We’ve just launched a free open course on ML observability that I wanted to share with the community. The course covers: 📚 Key concepts of ML monitoring and observability (data drift, data and model quality metrics, etc.) 🔡 Monitoring unstructured data (embeddings, texts, LLMs, etc.) 🛠 Different deployment architectures (batch ML monitoring jobs, near real-time ML monitoring, etc.) The course is free and open. All materials are public, with no sign-up required. You’ll work with open-source tools like Evidently, MLflow, Airflow, and Grafana. We’ve already published the first 12 videos with notes and code examples. We’ll add new lessons and deployment blueprints over the following weeks. The official course start date is October 16, 2023. You can also learn at your own pace. Course info and notes: https://learn.evidentlyai.com/ [Background] We’ve been working on Evidently since late 2020 and have spoken to 100s of data scientists, ML engineers, and ML platform teams in different industries. In this course, we tried to sum up answers to the frequent questions on the topic. It starts with high-level theoretical modules and goes to complete deployment blueprints. It is approachable for different levels of knowledge, and you can pick only the modules you are interested in. Looking forward to meeting you at the course! submitted by /u/mllena [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am trying to do machine learning in ArcPro, and I want to understand the relationship between x, y, numeric variable 1, numeric variable 2, and one nominal variable (classified; i.e. can be one of four values). I'd like to be able to predict numeric variable 1 based on everything else. Can ArcPro accommodate machine learning for anything other than raster type data. That is, can it be used to do machine learning on point (numeric) data? Thanks! submitted by /u/arcgis_123 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In 2023, Transformers made significant breakthroughs in time-series forecasting For example, earlier this year, Zalando proved that scaling laws apply in time-series as well. Providing you have large datasets ( And yes, 100,000 time series of M4 are not enough - smallest 7B Llama was trained on 1 trillion tokens! ) Nixtla curated a 100B dataset of time-series and trained TimeGPT, the first foundation model on time-series. The results are unlike anything we have seen so far. I published the results in my latest article. I hope the research will be insightful for people who work on time-series projects. Link: https://aihorizonforecast.substack.com/p/timegpt-the-first-foundation-model Note: If you know any other good resources on very large benchmarks for time series models, feel free to add them below. ​ submitted by /u/nkafr [link] [comments]

Hi everyone. I am aware that there is a plethora of deep generative models out there (e.g. variational autoencoders (VAE), GANs) that can model high-dimensional data as the images of latent variables under a non-linear mapping (typically neural network). In more traditional methods such as probabilistic PCA, the latent variables can be marginalised analytically. In Bayesian PCA (BPCA), we can additionally integrate out the linear mapping, from the latent space to the observation space, by adopting the variational lower bound that leads to closed form updates of the parameters. The Gaussian Process Latent Variable (GPLVM) model adopts a non-linear probabilistic mapping (a Gaussian process) that can be marginalised. These two models enjoy to a certain degree analytical solutions concerning the inference of the latent variables and the mapping. I have been wondering whether there is any research into more "complex" models (perhaps I should call them deep) that are capable of modelling more complex data distributions than the GPVLM and BPCA, but retain analytical solutions when inferring the posterior of the latent variables (like BPCA) or the mapping (like GPLVM)? What I like about the GPLVM and BPCA is that they possess an objective function (i.e. ELBO) that can be analytically optimised, as opposed to the intractable objective of VAEs that necessitates Monte-Carlo averages and stochastic gradient. Could somebody please point me to such examples of more complex generative models that admit analytical inference for working out the posterior of the latent variables or the mapping? ----- This has also been posted on stack exchange: https://ai.stackexchange.com/q/42418/61537 submitted by /u/ngiann [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Do I love teaching? Oh, absolutely, YES a big YES! My time as a TA for countless semesters has been amazing. Staying after hours, spending long evenings and early mornings, to make each of my students find ease in debugging both easy-peasy and mind-boggling programs – it’s been a joy, truly. Watching those fresh faces, whom I introduced to Python in their first year ( intro to programming lab), now immerse themselves into my computer vision labs, exploring computer vision and deep learning in their third/forth year – it’s incredibly rewarding! And yeah my students kind of like me! after each semester I get tons of emails thanking me and my TAship review is always good. But, ugh, do I have enough publications to become faculty? A big fat NO! My efforts have been relentless, and everyone in my department would nod in agreement. But luck and reviewers? Not my best pals, apparently. So yeah, I don’t have a stack of 8 top-tier papers. I’ve managed to scrape together 3, and a few second tiers. My citation count is not that bad somewhere between 200 and 300-ish. Now, what’s next for me? Dive into the industry? become a high school teacher? Or perhaps, do a postdoc journey, fingers crossed for a sprinkle more luck and few more papers? Edit: This doesn't mean I don't like research, I actually love it too, I have done quite a few internship in quite big companies, most of the time they extend my intership and I even got publication out of one in 5 month. But I just like to teach a lot! strangely I got social anxiety every where other than my classrooms/labs. submitted by /u/LongjumpingSchool646 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm seeing some architectures come out from the LLM world that probably wouldn't survive the trip to production. If you choose a vector database how will you handle your other database needs? Then you'll need 2 databases. https://bionic-gpt.com/blog/you-dont-need-a-vector-database/ submitted by /u/purton_i [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In the original paper of MoCo, it said that: Using a queue can make the dictionary large, but it also makes it intractable to update the key encoder by back-propagation (the gradient should propagate to all samples in the queue). First I thought that the main reason that the bp cannot imply on key encoder is that the queue operation is not differentable. But It seems not true. You can compute the gradient of all samples in the queue, then bp should be performed properly. See the code at the bottom. So WHAT IS THE REAL REASON THAT THE BP IS INTRACTABLE FOR KEY ENCODER? In my opinion, I think may be because of the large size of the queue (dictionary) which makes the memory explosive. python q = nn.Linear(768,128) k = nn.Linear(768,128) bs = 64 ks = 4095 model = nn.ModuleList([q,k]) x = torch.randn(bs, 768) optim = torch.optim.SGD(model.parameters(),lr=0.01) loss = nn.CrossEntropyLoss() def forward(x): xq = q(x) xk = k(x + 0.1) que = torch.rand(ks,128) pos = torch.einsum("nc,nc->n",xq,xk) neg = torch.einsum("nc,kc->nk",xq,que) out = torch.cat([pos.unsqueeze(-1),neg],dim=1) t = torch.zeros(out.shape[0],dtype=torch.long) l = loss(out,t) return l loss = forward(x) loss.backward() optim.step() submitted by /u/whishtLF [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

A senior phd student at a moderately famous university. I have a reasonable number of accepted papers as first author in tier-1 conferences. I was thinking of going into academia, so recently I started proposing many ideas to my advisor so that I can mentor some junior students. However my advisor is rejecting every idea I suggest saying it won’t work. I’m feeling very dejected and I feel like I should give up going into academia. I don’t know what I’m expecting from here. Is your advisor like this too? submitted by /u/mildlyphd [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Posted by Han Zhou, Student Researcher, and Subhrajit Roy, Senior Research Scientist, Google Research Prompting large language models (LLMs) has become an efficient learning paradigm for adapting LLMs to a new task by conditioning on human-designed instructions. The remarkable in-context learning (ICL) ability of LLMs also leads to efficient few-shot learners that can generalize from few-shot input-label pairs. However, the predictions of LLMs are highly sensitive and even biased to the choice of templates, label spaces (such as yes/no, true/false, correct/incorrect), and demonstration examples, resulting in unexpected performance degradation and barriers for pursuing robust LLM applications. To address this problem, calibration methods have been developed to mitigate the effects of t…  ( 93 min )

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a formidable force, revolutionizing how we conceive, create, and deliver software solutions. As technology advances at an unprecedented pace, the role of AI in this domain has become increasingly significant. It’s no longer just a buzzword; it’s a fundamental tool that promises to reshape the entire software development process.… Read More »Significance of AI in the development of software products The post Significance of AI in the development of software products appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 19 min )

Companies, more often, pay attention to automation and innovation over proficiency and productivity. However, firms can maintain a balance between both due to the extensive usage of AI and data science programs. Here are the stats that show the impact of AI and data science in diverse sectors: Applications of AI and data science have… Read More »Future of AI and data science – How to secure a bright career The post Future of AI and data science – How to secure a bright career appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 21 min )

At SHoP Architects, a New York City-based architectural firm, Mengyi Fan and her team aim to inspire industry professionals to create visual masterpieces by incorporating emerging technologies. Fan, the director of visualization at SHoP, has expertise that spans the fields of architectural visualization and design. She takes a definitive, novel and enduring approach to designing Read article >  ( 6 min )

Hi, we've just released a new version of AgileRL, our evolutionary hyperparameter optimisation framework built for RL that is 10x faster than SOTA. We've introduced PPO, Rainbow DQN, some sophisticated replay buffers, and also collaborated with the Farama Foundation to create some tutorials (more on the way). Please check it out and take it for a spin. We're also looking for contributors so get in touch if you would like to be involved! https://github.com/AgileRL/AgileRL submitted by /u/nicku_a [link] [comments]

I am currently dealing with an environment, that most of the time (90% of all state transitions) clips the action selected from the agent. Sometimes even down to the point where the action selected by the agent is completly ignored. This causes a lot of problems, because for example the entropy bonus does not works, since the agent learns to select any action, when it doesn't matter anyway but selects the same action (low entropy) when the actions have an effect. Using the PPO algorithm I was thinking of masking the state transitions in the policy updates, according to how much the action was clipped in the environment. And I thought V(s) should be masked, because it can still learn from the state transitions even if the action was effectively ignored by the environment. submitted by /u/flxh13 [link] [comments]

I'm training some agents using fairly vanilla PPO on a hand-made environment. These agents learn to perform the task pretty well, but while I was examining their action probabilities during an evaluation episode, I had the idea to turn off deterministic action selection. To my surprise, allowing probabilistic action selection (as opposed to argmax action selection) actually improved performance in some cases. I had always thought that deterministic actions during evaluation was fairly standard, but now am thinking that maybe I missed something and that there are cases where you wouldn't want determinism? My question is: how common is it actually to use deterministic actions vs. probabilistic ones at evaluation time, and does anyone know of studies/papers/examples where the authors found probabilistic evaluation to outperform determinism? submitted by /u/Impallion [link] [comments]

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Hey, So I am working on reinforcement learning package in C# (currently under heavy development): https://github.com/asieradzk/RL_Matrix My goal is to create something superior to unity's ML Agents for Godot to democratize access to reinforcement learning for people (without having them know what a tensor is) So far I've added some barebones DQN and PPO that (only output single discrete action) as proof of concept to test my code architecture. So I am going through the daunting task of having some universal workflow for setting up environments. For any shape observations and any count actions, both discrete and continuous. As I am finishing my multi-head multi-action output I've come to realise that there are many possible architectures I could setup multi head outputs, for instanc…

To my knowledge, when using the Q Learning family algorithm, we must know the next state as well as the action spaces in couple with that observation in order to evaluate the reward for the next state with the target network. But I have some problem when trying to define this next state in turn turn-based game in which the agent have to make a certain number of actions and then wait for the opponent to do some actions before it can interact with the environment again. We can take Hearthstone as an example that each player have to wait for other to play a number of cards before can take any action. Currently, I have two options for this: - Treat the environment right after the agent's turn ended, which will lack the action space. - Treat the environment just before the agent's turn begins, which will have all the actions available that it can choose from but this will make the agent's last action very noisy. That state could be a good state if the opponent playing badly or they are very good and make our last decision seem like a very bad choice. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. If my problem is a common task that others have already solved many times, I will be very thankful for that keyword. submitted by /u/No-Concentrate-6037 [link] [comments]

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Hi ! My group (4 people) has chosen to make an application that translates ancient stone inscriptions to modern languages as our university project . We can use external libraries to process images that we are going to translate but as we understood we have to build the neural network ourselves from scratch. My questions are 1) is this possible to do within 10 months? 2) if so how would you approach it ? submitted by /u/sakith123 [link] [comments]

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How does the neural network process input that were same but shown different to the network model? submitted by /u/Sith_vader3 [link] [comments]

i gave chatgpt vision an illustration of neural network from The Principles of Deep Learning Theory. what to know how correct its reponse is here is the response: https://preview.redd.it/inqe5xukxptb1.png?width=453&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e1079baeae8235b0e03a677e4006d1077af36a8 submitted by /u/YeshwanthRam [link] [comments]

Artificial intelligence (AI) can provide "machine usefulness" for human workers, augmenting their jobs rather than replacing them. However, there is a concern that AI could lead to job displacement and reinforce economic inequality. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu emphasizes the importance of making AI more useful to humans and ensuring that the economic benefits are shared widely. He suggests that innovations that augment workers' tasks can lead to prosperity for the workforce. Acemoglu also highlights the need for worker power and the careful implementation of technology to achieve shared prosperity and productivity gains. Source : https://idss.mit.edu/news/who-will-benefit-from-ai/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

I just need three things for it: It must be knowledgeable about things, such as physics, math, hystory, books, geography, etc. It also must be original, with a high level of SEO and AI detection score. It must be available in Italy. The last part is essential. Claude 2 is very famous but with sms verification from usa (which I don't have and I don't want to give credit card info/pay to have) it's made almost impossible even with vpn. submitted by /u/luigirovatti1 [link] [comments]

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Creating true, enduring, lasting peace on Earth is an ambitious and complex endeavor that requires multifaceted approaches. Here’s a bold, outside-the-box plan that may surprise you: Step 1: Establish a Global Consciousness: Educational Overhaul: Revamp global educational systems to foster empathy, understanding, and appreciation for diverse cultures, religions, and viewpoints from a young age. Step 2: Eradicate Poverty and Inequality: Universal Basic Assets (UBA): Implement a Universal Basic Assets program, where every person on Earth is granted a share of global resources. Step 3: Create a Single Global Governance Entity: World Federation: Establish a democratically elected World Federation that respects regional autonomy but has overriding authority on global issues like…

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Just had a random idea: What if you train a video generating AI, but feed it videos that are reversed? You could show it an image of a crashed car, and it would generate a video of the crash. Show it a broken vase, it would "repair" it. It could one day become like the "reconstruct crime scene" in Detroit: Become Human. What are your thoughts about this? submitted by /u/FluffyIllustrator805 [link] [comments]

A Nature survey of over 1,600 researchers reveals that AI tools are becoming increasingly common in science and are expected to be 'very important' or 'essential' in the next decade. Scientists express concerns about how AI is transforming research, including reliance on pattern recognition without understanding, bias in data, fraud, and irreproducible research. The survey shows that AI tools provide faster ways to process data, speed up computations, and save time and money. Among researchers who use AI, more than one-quarter believe AI tools will become 'essential' to their field in the next decade. Large language models like ChatGPT are mentioned as both impressive and concerning examples of AI tools in science. Source : https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02980-0 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

I'm looking for a (free) ai image generator like Artbreeder Mixer, that has functions that allow you to "morph" or mix images together via text prompts. Ive looked at a bunch already, and even tried adding the text of the different types in the prompts, bu Ive been getting separated results (like "cat" , "man", "head" wont combine the man and the cat, but rather give me un-morphed results, like a regular man, plus a cat in a suit with no human features. I even get a result with a man standing behind a cat! Ive tried StarryAI, imagecreator, wepik, cant afford midjourney or paid ones right now, some others I cant remember with no mixing... Artbreeder's interface, you can keep adding and it will mix them together. I made these images and others like them very easy in Artbreeder, but its plan is very limited - I could buy more credits, but I need to wait a few days (new job, not paid yet, broke today... lol): ​ morph between man and donkey Morph between angry rapper and gorilla SO, if anyone can suggest some free, or almost free (generous newbie credits?) that can do mixes like this - please point me in the right direction. submitted by /u/magusat999 [link] [comments]

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to create professional-looking profile pictures for job hunting websites like LinkedIn. Apps like Remini, Try It On AI, and AI Suit Up use AI-based software to generate slick profile photos that mimic the work of expert photographers. Users upload multiple selfies, and the AI software creates artificial photos with different hairstyles, clothing, and backdrops. While some find the results realistic, others think they look artificial. The AI services are popular because they are cheap or free, making them accessible to those who can't afford professional headshots. However, opinions are divided on whether AI-generated photos are beneficial or detrimental to self-esteem. Some believe that AI-generated photos allow individuals to put their best self forward and potentially increase their chances of being considered for opportunities. Others worry that relying on AI-generated photos may negatively impact self-worth and confidence. Recruiters generally do not consider whether a photo is AI-generated when evaluating job applications. Source : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67054382 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Hi, im currently filming a documentary, but I’m so busy filming, i don’t have time to write notes on footage for the editor. Does anyone know of any ai tool that can help with this and save time and streamline this process? King regards submitted by /u/Brand0n_C [link] [comments]

Hey folks, how would you guys see the effect of AI? Will the small softwares companies will go bankrupt? Since the lots of software are using tools like ChatGpt, Midway Journey etc. It just the starting of new AI technology era which will evolved over the years. In that time we will see more and more AI software which will likely provide efficient and better solution as compare to traditional and open source software. So my question is how do you guys see this? Will small software companies or open source software programs days are number? submitted by /u/Haziq12345 [link] [comments]

Opera has launched Opera One — a new version of the browser that comes packaged with an AI-powered chatbot called Aria.[1] Adobe is going all in on AI, announcing three new generative AI models today that add powerful features to Illustrator and Adobe Express and vastly improve Photoshop’s text-to-image capabilities.[2] ‘South Park’ to Tackle AI for Next Event Special, Releases Teaser.[3] World’s first AI tutor launched in Australia to help students get through their exams.[4] Sources: [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/21/23768888/opera-one-browser-aria-ai-assistant-chatbot [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911114/adobe-max-firefly-generative-ai-model-photoshop-illustrator-express [3] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/south-park-ai-joining-panderverse-1235615276/ [4] https://www.techguide.com.au/news/computers-news/worlds-first-ai-tutor-launched-in-australia-to-help-students-get-through-their-exams/ submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]

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I’m looking for input and advice on tools for web designers. I use Wordpress a lot, Magento some and frequently code by hand in html JavaScript and PHP. I know there are some AI tools out there now but I don’t know which are best and wanted to find out what people thoughts are on this subject. What tools are you using, for what, and why? Thanks! submitted by /u/PowerTarget [link] [comments]

LLMs' tendency to make up false statements (hallucinate) is a major concern. We need ways to inspect whether they really "know" something is true or not so we can reduce hallucinations. In a new paper, researchers found that LLMs contain an internal "truth vector" - an emergent linear structure that represents factual truth values. They had the insight to visualize how GPT represents simple true/false sentences. The true ones clustered together, while false ones clustered elsewhere - suggesting some kind of 'truth direction' in its learned representations. To test this, they trained linear "probes" on one dataset, and found they could generalize to accurately detect truth values in totally different datasets about other topics. They also directly modified the models to add or subtract the identified truth vectors from its processing of statements. This could flip assessments of truth value, showing the vector causally influences reasoning. Together, these findings provide evidence that neural networks can create emergent, linear structures that represent factual truth. This finding could eventually help make AI systems less prone to hallucinations and falsehoods. TLDR: LLMs can create emergent linear representations of truth. This sheds light on how AI represents abstract concepts and could help us reduce hallucinations. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am working on a research topic in Data Engineering. Forgive me if this is a question frequently asked, I couldn't find this specifically in the FAQ. What are good publication tips and journals to publish in? I read through a few journals and all of them are big publications. What if I opt fot some upcoming or other niche (maybe data engineering) journals submitted by /u/Sherbhy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

We have a new benchmark out called SWE-bench (arxiv) It challenges LMs to solve real GitHub issues (feature requests & bug reports) from popular Python repos. Answers are validated using unit tests we crawled from those repos. The benchmark at swebench.com/ shows that even the strongest models, such as Claude 2 and GPT-4, get less than 5% accuracy. ​ We are here to answer any questions you may have. submitted by /u/ofirpress [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I would like to understand how I can calculate the probability that a sample belongs to the distribution a diffusion model was trained on. Say, I have an image of a car, and I would like to know whether this image belongs to the distribution that is estimated by the diffusion model. So I would like to know the probability between zero and one at the car belongs to this distribution Do you know how I technically can do this? submitted by /u/That_Phone6702 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey guys Looking for some ideas. I'm building out a jupyter book that will be a tutorial on how to use a research platform for data analysis and modelling. My PI has given me free liberty over it. I can not think of a good idea to do the analysis and build the model on. It does not need to be complex but should be good enough so that any researcher, student or organization using the platform can get a good idea of how to use it for ML. Any thoughts on a good area to look into? Any recommendations? Note this will be a tutorial and as such an overly complex model is unnecessary. I just can not figure out what to look into so hoping you guys could give thoughts about possible areas in climate, weather and earth science that I could focus on for the tutorial in the jupyter book. submitted by /u/AdditionalFun3 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

First time submitting to ARR here. I was quite confused about this paper resubmission thing. I got rejected by EMNLP (submission directly to EMNLP with openreview) a week ago and I am planning to resubmit it to the ARR system (also using openreview). Does this EMNLP submission count as a previous ARR submission that should be mentioned or not? Do I need to withdraw the paper from EMNLP openreview prior to submitting it to ARR openreview? submitted by /u/Icy-Distribution6887 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi! Happy to share a project I've been working on for a while: UI-Act https://github.com/TobiasNorlund/UI-Act It's an AI model architecture designed to autonomously navigate and interact with computers using the graphical user interface. Think of it as a co-pilot that "sees" your screen and acts on it, just as a human would. In essence, it's a custom transformer model taking prompt and screenshots as input, with output heads to predict low-level actions i.e. mouse clicks. In the demo, it has been trained to compute simple expressions in a calculator window, using expert demonstrations/behavior cloning. If scaled up appropriately however, it could provide a basis for a general agent to automate arbitrary tasks on a computer. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on it, and especially with regards to the trend towards general AI agents and assistants (Windows Copilot / Adept ACT-1 / AutoGPT etc). LMs equipped with e.g. function-calling is a trendy approach, that rely on text-based state representations and APIs to take action. In cases where this is unfeasible, UI-based agents might provide a more general alternative. As the agent's interface to the computer is shared with humans, it can be easily taught using expert demonstrations, and require little or no technical expertice. Let me know what you think! submitted by /u/tobibbelfuel [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

​ Confidence and trustworthiness of Tsetlin Machines. Hi all! Just completed a new chapter in the book An Introduction to Tsetlin Machines: https://tsetlinmachine.org Happy to receive feedback! Abstract: Collaboration can be essential to manage complex projects. One example is building a house. You then need the expertise of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. Each profession brings unique skills to the table. Similarly, different types of Tsetlin machines can have distinct capabilities. In this chapter, you learn how Tsetlin machines can team up, allowing them to achieve more than they could on their own. The effectiveness of a team relies on recognising each member's strengths and limitations. Appreciating where your expertise stops and where your coworkers' expertise begins is crucial for effective collaboration. We first explore how Tsetlin machines can assess their competence in Section 7.1. Using the vote count from Chapter 1, you learn to measure how confident a Tsetlin machine is when it makes its decisions. It is possible to be highly confident and still perform poorly. To be trustworthy, confidence must be in line with one's capabilities. Therefore, Section 7.1 also covers how to evaluate trustworthiness. Next, in Section 7.2, you discover how to build a team of Tsetlin machines with different skills. By assessing each Tsetlin machine's confidence, you can lean on the confident ones when making decisions. The result is a Tsetlin machine composite - a construction where multiple Tsetlin machines join forces. You can think of it as a composite material, such as epoxy, which reinforces resin with fibres, making it strong, lightweight, and durable. submitted by /u/olegranmo [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello all, Just wrapped up Task 1.1 for anomaly detection in student dropout rates. Keen for some extra eyes on it. Task Highlights: Data Pre-processing & Normalisation K-Means Clustering Gaussian Anomaly Detector Used PCA for dimensionality reduction Links to the following files: data.csv Task 1.1 - Rubric.pdf Task1.1Script.ipynb https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17XcjEoYCrDWqf90VVNdkLAkYNdtWWwGu?usp=sharing Would greatly appreciate any feedback! Cheers! submitted by /u/Nook31 [link] [comments]

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Hi everyone, I’m thrilled to share a prototype we've been tirelessly working on. We are developing a virtualization environment for applications, specifically tailored to engineers, designers, data scientists, and researchers. In a nutshell, our platform enables users to run cloud-hosted desktop apps from any device, making it appear as if the applications are installed on their local machines, while they're actually operating on a remote server. The ultimate goal is to obliterate barriers between local and cloud execution, especially for compute-intensive workloads, thereby allowing seamless usage of High-Performance Computing software on the cloud with the scalability to adjust computing resources as per necessity. We’re here to solicit your invaluable feedback on our product video demo. Your insights will not only help us identify any blind spots and enhance our solution but also better understand the needs and preferences of our potential user base. 📽 [https://youtu.be/QR8FWRnPrXM?feature=shared] We're eagerly awaiting your thoughts and appreciate you taking the time to help us refine our product! Thank you! :) submitted by /u/aaron-cesaro [link] [comments]

Hey all, I found Dolly to be a very interesting project when it was released but I'm curious if it has similar value today because a lot of synthetic data generation options seem to be popping up. Now it seems like Dolly is human generated/curated by over 5k employees (which is great), but wouldn't it be a better approach now to have Llama70b (or maybe Falcon) just generate future variants of 15k rows? I havent been able to figure out why we arent seeing more synthetic datasets like this on HF? Is the bottleneck licensing, compute or just incentive? Heres the original Dolly post thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/120usfk/r_hello_dolly_democratizing_the_magic_of_chatgpt/ submitted by /u/buzzyness [link] [comments]

What is the loss function that needs to be used for a task that takes an input image with a lot of haze and produces an image with reduced haze. The architecture is a simple encoder decoder architecture. I tried MSE as some articles and ML guides say that MSE is good for pixel wise comparison and also tried Categorical Crossentropy but none of them work so great. MSE works but produces artefacts like red/green/ blue spots and spatters and at worse times it produces a white image. The research on this task includes use of SIDNet[Single Image Dehazing Net], Transmission maps, Dark channel prior algorithm, FFA net, etc trained on the Benchmark datasets (RESIDE,SOTS). I aim to create a simple architecture for college project so I chose the Enc-Dec architecture. Any suggestions are appreciated. submitted by /u/Wild_Basil_2396 [link] [comments]

Autonomous systems startup, PassiveLogic, assembled a differentiable computing team, to build a fast systems language with native performance differentiability. Their latest benchmark trains networks two orders of magnitude faster than PyTorch and Tensorflow. See: LinkedIn Post&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A(7118052434916110337%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7117911978106355712)) It's a collaborative effort with the Swift community and Apple's compiler team, using the Swift language as a strongly typed embedded language that performs ahead of time compilation of graph neural nets. The focus is on fusing systems programming and AI engineering into a single native high performance language, to enable typed heterogeneous inference and training. The compiler development is open sourced as part of the standard Swift package. Try it yourself at swift.org. submitted by /u/taharvey [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I recently tried to refactor a previous project that I had, but I realized that after making all of the changes the performance wasn't reproducible anymore. I decided to start from scratch, make incremental changes, and make sure that the model's performance is maintained with each change. Very basic in hindsight, but I guess I was too hasty with coding. Anyway, running the full model's training and evaluation with each change is proving to take too long. I'm curious if there's any other way that people implement TDD in the context of machine learning since projects/applications tend to be more time consuming then typical applications. submitted by /u/Seankala [link] [comments]

Posted by Nicholas Rubin, Senior Research Scientist, and Ryan Babbush, Head of Quantum Algorithms, Quantum AI Team If you’ve paid attention to the quantum computing space, you’ve heard the claim that in the future, quantum computers will solve certain problems exponentially more efficiently than classical computers can. They have the potential to transform many industries, from pharmaceuticals to energy. For the most part, these claims have rested on arguments about the asymptotic scaling of algorithms as the problem size approaches infinity, but this tells us very little about the practical performance of quantum computers for finite-sized problems. We want to be more concrete: Exactly which problems are quantum computers more suited to tackle than their classical counterparts, an…  ( 94 min )

At one of the U.K.’s largest technology festivals, top enterprises and startups are this week highlighting their latest innovations, hosting workshops and celebrating the growing tech ecosystem based in the country’s southwest. The Bristol Technology Festival today showcased the work of nine startups that recently participated in a challenge hosted by Digital Catapult — the Read article >  ( 6 min )

Put the pedal to the metal this GFN Thursday as Forza Motorsport leads 23 new games in the cloud. Plus, Acer’s Predator Connect 6E is the newest addition to the GeForce NOW Recommended program, with easy cloud gaming quality-of-service (QoS) settings built in to give Ultimate members the best streaming experience. No Breaks, No Limits, Read article >  ( 6 min )

submitted by /u/gwern [link] [comments]

Most real world applications for RL (robotics, game dev, finance) are in not normally done in Python, yet all major RL frameworks are written in Python. Is there a good/high-performance cross-language framework to do RL in other languages like C++/.Net/Java? If not, do you think people would be interested in such a framework? ​ submitted by /u/xor24 [link] [comments]

Do you know any work that tries to develop RL agents that exploit some sort of high-level model of the problem (it could also be given by an expert human) to learn faster or operate on out-of-distribution scenarios? I'm particularly interested in Causal Models, but any similar thing could be interesting for me submitted by /u/fedetask [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/aabra__ka__daabra [link] [comments]

I've been looking at DrQ-v2 (https://github.com/facebookresearch/drqv2) recently and it samples from replay in a way that seems odd to me but may have a purpose I don't understand. They store experiences in a compressed file by episode, this makes some sense since it means they don't have to store everything in RAM and they delay disk writes until the end of the episode so they don't slow down the sim operation. On sampling, they randomly select an episode then randomly select an experience from the episode, calculating the n-step reward dynamically at sample time instead of at experience storage time. This is then fed to the model by a pytorch DataLoader. This means a _lot_ of disk reads during the optimization step which can't be ideal but I'll put that aside. What is the advantage of doing this selection by episode? It may give a better spread across episodes in each update, but I'm not sure that makes up for the potential downsides of making prioritization and other replay tricks much harder. Any ideas? submitted by /u/EDMismyO2 [link] [comments]

I have a very simple observation: a list of random value state = [random.uniform(-0.2, 0.2) for _ in range(200)] reward = state * actions . The reward is not using the next state, it's using the previous state i gave to the model. So basically i already give the answer to the model, the best action is : if state > 0 action =1, if state < 0 action = -1 I tried using PPO, but it seem not learning at all. My test_env.py is here: ``` import gymnasium as gym import numpy as np from gymnasium import spaces from gymnasium.utils import seeding from stable_baselines3.common.vec_env import DummyVecEnv import random class TestEnv(gym.Env): metadata = {"render.modes": ["human"]} def __init__( self, item_count, test_steps, is_train = True, ): self.is_train = is_train self.test_steps = test_step…

These research papers were presented at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (opens in new tab) (VL/HCC 2023), a premier forum for design, theory, and application of computing technologies for programming, modelling, and communication. Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the way novice programmers and everyday computer users tap into the capabilities […] The post Microsoft at VL/HCC 2023: Focus on co-audit tools for spreadsheets appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 10 min )

This post is a follow-on to a discussion that started on Twitter yesterday. This tweet must have resonated with a lot of people because it’s had over 230,000 views so far. You almost have to study advanced math to solve basic math problems. Sometimes a high school student can solve a real world problem that […] Homework problems are rigged first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 7 min )

The advent of generative AI is empowering everyone alike – organizations, small businesses, individuals, students, and medical professionals, to name a few. The last couple of years have been revolutionary for artificial intelligence innovation and transformation. How will 2024 shape up for AI, AI tools, and related professionals? Let’s analyze the trends that are most… Read More »12 Generative AI Trends to Watch Out for The post 12 Generative AI Trends to Watch Out for appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 20 min )

Top dating apps Tinder, Hinge and Bumble have all stated that they're already investing in AI to make their apps better. They're using it to verify profiles, match people based on bios and interests, and help generate profile descriptions and liven conversations. But what about machine learning on user photos? iris Dating uses AI to analyze user input in the form of liking or disliking faces ("swiping" profiles). We all know if we like blondes or brunettes, blue or brown eyes, short or long hair, beard or no beard, etc. But AI can pick up the subtlest features (proportions, distances, curvatures etc.) and build a face map. A matrix of features, if you will. It doesn't just look for a person looking like your favorite celebrity crush. It understands what you're really attracted to. From there it's an easy path: if it knows which features attract me, it can predict my level of attraction to a specific individual (specifically, their face). Find the persons with the highest predicted attractiveness (for me, not for everyone), rank them by attraction for me, and we have a potential high mutual attraction match. The two stats I have are that on average women like 55%(!) of the profiles iris picks for them; and that users have 40x higher chances of matching when they've trained the model to understand their taste. I know it takes a lot more than a pretty face to make for a great relationship, but it sure doesn't hurt to start with strong physical attraction. Missed connections on Craigslist are about just that: seeing a face you can't forget. Find me more of these "wow" faces and let's go from there. What do you think? Is it too early? Too bold? Too niche? submitted by /u/akahamlet [link] [comments]

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The AI research job market is going through a shakeup, with a high demand for skilled researchers and a scarcity of talent. Companies closely monitor the movements of researchers as an indicator of their ability to transition from concept to product. The market is highly competitive, with researchers being offered high salaries and compensation packages. This has led to high turnover and attrition in many companies, causing unsettledness among employees. Despite the challenges, the investment in AI research is expected to drive innovation and push the boundaries of the Transformer architecture. Source : https://www.interconnects.ai/p/ai-research-job-market submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

I'm looking for ways to create art for a game I'm creating. submitted by /u/Yenii_3025 [link] [comments]

Transformers are great at NLP and computer vision tasks, but I was surprised to learn they still lag behind simple linear models at time series forecasting. The issue is how most Transformer architectures treat each timestamp as a token and fuse all the variable data from that moment. This makes two big problems: Variables recorded at slightly different times get blurred together, losing important timing info Each token can only see a single moment, no long-term dependencies So Transformers struggle to extract useful patterns and correlations from the data. Some researchers from Tsinghua University took a fresh look at this and realized the Transformer components themselves are solid, they just need to flip the architecture for time series data. Their "Inverted Transformer" (or iTransformer): Makes each variable's full history into a token, instead of each timestamp Uses self-attention over variables to capture relationships Processes time dependencies per variable with feedforward layers This simple tweak gives all the benefits we want: State-of-the-art forecasting accuracy, beating both linear models and standard Transformers Better generalization to unseen variables Increased interpretability Ability to leverage longer historical context TLDR: Inverting Transformers to align with time series structure allows them to outperform alternatives in working with time series data. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

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I guess I'm looking for the impossible but does anyone know of a generator that has all of the following qualities in order of importance least to most important: Has a massive variety of styles like Womba's private discord server does. "Create variants" function like how a Womba discord personal server generator allows you to do. Generates beautiful "digital art" style images like the digital https://www.unstability.ai/ does. (Man those images are pretty) faces are really good most of the time. (It's frusterating as it looks so good but I can't seem to get any group sex poses going on.) Provides a variety of poses such as https://easywithai.com/ai-image-generators/promptchan-ai/ which also allows you to upload you own images for poses, like how I could upload a real life orgy image and as long as it could distinguish the bodies as being separate (not a big pile of limbs) it does pretty good, but lacks severely lacks in facial quality. Like a big booty girl in hyperreal style 1080P or higher resolution. (Again Womba is good here, but they are just extreme on their restrictions.) 1080P should be the minimum for any paid service as how can we truely enjoy a full screne image on anything less without it pixeling out? Doesn't cost $150/month (yes I found one that does all this but their premium subscription cost like $150/month (seduced.ai) and it's not even unlimited. I paid $90 for a full year at Womba discord unlimited but again, $150/month is just not worth it. If anyone knows of a server that has all these for around $25/month or less, please let me know. If really appreciate it. submitted by /u/russader [link] [comments]

I have a high resolution black and white print and a generic quality colour image of the same photo, that I'd like AI to look at both images and make the B&W into colour. Is this possible? submitted by /u/NikonD3X1985 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Philipp [link] [comments]

Cybersecurity firm Avast is calling out a long-lived tool “LoveGPT,” that has haunted popular dating apps and that has been upgraded with artificial intelligence, gaining the ability to build fake profiles and manipulate unsuspecting users.[1] The outsider told the WSJ that Microsoft used AI from its partner OpenAI, which was then used to launch GitHub Copilot at $10 per month, but lost $20 per user in the average six months on average in the first 2023. Some Copilot users cost as much as $80 per month.[2] SK Telecom said on Monday that it successfully wrapped up its international AI competition of 226 teams, “Prompter Day Seoul 2023,” held in partnership with OpenAI.[3] Google DeepMind Researchers Introduce Promptbreeder: A Self-Referential and Self-Improving AI System that can Automatically Evolve Effective Domain-Specific Prompts in a Given Domain.[4] Sources: [1] https://decrypt.co/200787/lovegpt-ai-dating-apps-catfishing-hack-avast [2] https://game-news24.com/2023/10/10/microsoft-lost-20-for-every-10-copilot-ai-subscription-report-45-for-every-10-copilot-ai/ [3] https://asianews.network/skt-openai-hold-ai-competition-for-social-good/ [4] https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/10/08/google-deepmind-researchers-introduce-promptbreeder-a-self-referential-and-self-improving-ai-system-that-can-automatically-evolve-effective-domain-specific-prompts-in-a-given-domain/ submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]

VIDEO EDITING InVideo CapCut Filmora Veed io Rotor KEYWORD RESEARCH VidiQ Summarized YT Summary CONTENT CREATION Explore Al Vidds Opus Descript Lumen5 Steve Al AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT ManyChat TubeBuddy Canva Hootsuite ANALYTICS Vidyo Nova Al Daily Life Tools Taskade TLVD Bardeen Al Vondy Al Notion Al Chatbots Tools YatterPlus Typewise Quickchat Cohere Kaizan Coding Tools Durable Al 10Web Akkia Replit Deepcode Design Tools Flair Al Autodraw StockIMG Booth Al Clipdrop Content Creation Tools Writesonic Beautiful Al Tome Al ChatABC Steve Al Music Tools Boomy Amper Jukedeck Melodrive BrainFM Writing Tools AISEO Quillbot Writesonic Bertha Al Simplified Youtube Tools Eightify Thumbly Steve Al ClipMaker TubeBuddy Twitter Tools Tweetmonk Tribescaler Postwise Tweetlify Tweethunter Sales Tools Lavender Warmer Regie Twain Octane Marketing Tools simplified ContentEdge Copt Smith Copy Al Mutiny Research Tools Consensus Paperpal Trinka Writesonic scholarcy I'm just sharing my experiences and observations in the field of ai. LIST AND SITE submitted by /u/PerceptionPlayful469 [link] [comments]

Awesome ChatGPT Prompts submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]

Hello, first time using Google Colab and huggingface datasets. Colab notebook is easy to setup but I can't seem to figure out how to download datasets from huggingface. I am trying to download https://huggingface.co/datasets/kili-technology/plastic_in_river dataset in Colab Notebook. After reading some beginners forums, I modified the example to look like one below but it failed. from datasets import load_dataset data_files = {"train": "train.csv", "test": "test.csv", "validation": "validation.csv"} dataset = load_dataset("kili-technology/plastic_in_river", data_files=data_files) Because there's no path to the files to be downloaded. Can someone explain how to download datasets from huggingface please? Downloading builder script: 100% 3.25k/3.25k [00:00 in () 2 3 data_files = {"train": "train.csv", "test": "test.csv", "validation": "validation.csv"} ----> 4 dataset = load_dataset("kili-technology/plastic_in_river", data_files=data_files) 5 frames /usr/local/lib/python3.10/dist-packages/datasets/data_files.py in resolve_pattern(pattern, base_path, allowed_extensions, download_config) 366 if allowed_extensions is not None: 367 error_msg += f" with any supported extension {list(allowed_extensions)}" --> 368 raise FileNotFoundError(error_msg) 369 return out 370 FileNotFoundError: Unable to find 'https://huggingface.co/datasets/kili-technology/plastic_in_river/resolve/main/train.csv' submitted by /u/0ni0nrings [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've recently been trying to pre-train my own small language model on the tiny-series datasets on huggingface. I also wanted to use a model similar to MEGABYTE but I don't understand how using bytes would work. The only implementation I could find from lucidrains used str(chr(max(32, token))) to decode any token (byte) to a character and put the embedding size as 256. Firstly, why 256 and not 256-32 as any values below 32 are ignored? Also, many byte-level models including this and ByteT5 mention that they can process any text sequence even in a multilingual setting, however how would that be true if we are only using one byte, would we have to move to 2 bytes or use an UNK token, and if we did use 2 bytes that would make our embedding size around 65000 which defeats sort of the point as o…  ( 10 min )

Consider a predictive model that is predicting if an outcome Y will occur in Q1 2023, based on data from Q1 2022. Now, if want to predict outcomes for 2024, we must use last years data to build the model, but we are going to have some bias if there are features that vary year over year. Is the best approach in such a situation to try and tune/validate the model with other years in the hopes of mitigating any features that are correlated with a specific year? Any help would be much appreciated, as I can't find agreed upon methods. submitted by /u/unga123 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have a goal and am looking for direction from others who know more than me about machine learning. I want to submit 5-10 pieces of text to a model. The text will be anecdotes from a common experience but each one from a different person’s perspective. For example, if a family visits a theme park, each family member will have a story or two about the day. Each family’s story would be a submission to the model. One person might have loved the roller coaster and can tell about the exciting parts. Another person maybe just can’t stop talking about how great he food was. Someone else maybe felt sick and complains the line at the bathroom was too long. Perhaps another family member also rode the same roller coasters as the first person but instead hated it, so would have a very different description of it than the first. All these anecdotes are submitted to the model. Then, the model can be queried. Such as, “Tell me about the theme park.” or “I love roller coasters. Tell me about the theme park.” or “I tend to overeat, tell me about the theme park.” (the model wouldn’t hype of the food, maybe it would talk about how much exercise the visitors get by walking around all day.) In this case of a theme park context, the model would have a preconception of a theme park. It would know the general concept, know of several examples or standards that it could compare this theme park against, understand it’s all for fun, etc. This type of model may be available as an API or model already and I just don’t know about it. That’d be fine, please point me towards it. Or, maybe there’s something already available but would need tweaked or customized. submitted by /u/Semper_Disco [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

Can you give easy to understand sources and hands-on practice methodology to master ML? Help me understand build the models in and out . Thank you submitted by /u/the_mystic_1 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Over Feb 12-13 of 2024, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is sponsoring a workshop titled “Integrating LLMs into the Materials Chemistry Curriculum” in Golden, Colorado. We aim to explore and develop innovative ways to incorporate large language models (LLMs, e.g. GPT, ChatGPT, and Bard) into upper division chemistry laboratories and virtual lab experiences. During the workshop, participants will brainstorm and create demonstrations incorporating LLMs into the curriculum. The event will bring together folks across academia and the private sector with disciplinary backgrounds that range across chemistry, computer science, materials science, physics, and education. There is no registration fee, and we anticipate being able to cover the majority of participant travel costs thanks to NSF support. Participants early in their career (i.e., graduate students, postdoctoral scholars) are particularly encouraged to apply. If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please fill out the Google form (link below). Please feel free to distribute this invitation widely. Application: https://forms.gle/P9QdNiCuaUAHFZj29 submitted by /u/KC2792 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, I'm a developer with 6 years of experience in the mobile field, and I recently completed my master's degree in artificial intelligence (Text mining). I want to transition into the field of AI, but I need more experience with projects in the "real world," outside of academia, and I'd like to contribute to an open-source project. I looked on Github, but I ended up feeling confused and not sure where to start. P.S.: I did some research in this subreddit, but the posts about contributions seemed a bit dated. submitted by /u/Substantial_Fact_205 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Video: https://youtu.be/0m12vkaoE7w ​ Detailed Medium post will follow in the upcoming days. https://medium.com/@pssdplayer submitted by /u/HistorianCrafty3514 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have collected over 20 million shopify products & had the following ideas for them: - LLM ( Finetune an llm to know how to speak ecom ) - Video bot that can make videos on those products, using their description, elevenlabs & AIFaceGen - EcomStore that will markup the products about 30% ( This will need the bot to frequently scrape, to ensure that the products are up to date ) - Selling the dataset based on fragments, like 1$ per 1k-10k records, depends on what sells. Please let me know if these are good ideas, and if someone would like to support / help me in any way ( I just need to selfhost my supabase instance, & add all the products to it & then dev can get started ) submitted by /u/AdonisCodes [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

As the title says I’m looking for an open-source AI model for generating question-and-answers with a correct answer option and explanation to the correct answer from the input context. So far I have tried these models, TheBloke/Llama-2-7B-GPTQ TheBloke/Llama-2-13B-GPTQ TheBloke/Llama-2-7b-Chat-GPTQ (the output is not consistent. Sometimes I get an empty response or without the correct answer option and an explanation data) TheBloke/Llama-2-13b-Chat-GPTQ (even 7b is better) TheBloke/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1-GGUF(so far this is the only one that gives the output consistently. But not able to generate more than 2 QA due to max token limit of 512. Even tried setting the max token as 1024, 2048 but nothing helped) TheBloke/Mistral-7B-OpenOrca-GGUF NousResearch/Llama-2-7b-chat-hf My system configurations are: Windows 10 with 16GB GPU Additional Information: The input prompt token will be around 250-350 tokens per request. submitted by /u/gokulcv [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I want to build a model to predict churn in a third party logistics company. What variables should make up my data? Any help would do. Thanks submitted by /u/DisastrousAd8814 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone, I have a specific online vectorization use case: I'm looking to search the internet for articles, vectorize these articles along with the search queries, and then retrieve the most relevant passages from them. Currently, I have basic hosting through DigitalOcean. Could anyone recommend the most suitable vector dataset for this task? Additionally, considering my resources, is it feasible to run this system solely on CPUs? And if so, would this setup be scalable if deployed on CPUs only? submitted by /u/Traditional-Poet2746 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi all, for a text work of mine I am trying to do a project based on generating digital twin of networks. My goal is to create a digital twin of a network and then work on it from a cyber security point of view. I will briefly explain what I would like to do. I am currently using software for network vulnerability scans (OpenVAS). I use this software to perform network vulnerability scans at the network level, so basically to OpenVAS I pass a network (for example 192.168.xx.xx/24) to automatically identify all the vulnerabilities that are there. The next step ( what I'd like to do and that's why I'm asking for your advice) is to create a digital twin of the newly scanned network and then perform a penetration test on this digital twin of the network, without going to stress the actual network. Ideally, I would like to pass the output of the OpenVAS vulnerability scans, routing rules, and firewall rules to some tool that will then generate for me the digital twin of the network, which will then be used for offensive cybersecurity, so exploits, privilege escalation, etc.... will be tested on this digital twin without worrying about breaking some kind of service or stressing the real network. What I am asking is, do you know of any tool that would do the trick for me? So some tool that allows me to generate a digital twin of a network by providing as input vulnerability scans (xml,json,csv etc...), routing rules, firewall rules, pcap traces etc... Do you have any references or documentation? Are you aware of any open source tools? I thank you for your helpfulness! ​ submitted by /u/Salt-Arugula-8128 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Quick intro Lineups are one of the first steps in the VFX pipeline Source: - orignal footage that was shot on set - a reference (quicktime) video from the film edit. Task: The reference shows modifications to the original footage. They can be : - timewarp (either fixed retimes like 200% speed or completely random) - transform (moved the image in x/y axis, rotation, scale, etc.) So the lineup task is to align the original footage to the reference quicktime. What I did so Far: Made a simple script in the software Nuke, using some Python and readily available tools to make it work on a simple shot. General logic is compare every frame and the associated one is the frame with the least difference between the two. This works on super simple and straightforward tasks. (can provide more info if needed). Issue: Some references are more heavily modified. They can have some muzzle flash, basic 3d objects or even some slight error introduced like a distortion applied to the image when none shouldn't so it will never be perfectly aligned. This makes the difference of the full frame higher for some frames, making the lineup wrong. (it will take the wrong frame that has no muzzle flash, because it has less difference...)Some other things to consider is that watermarks are covering the ref and the colors are not perfectly matching, can get them close enough, but there's a difference. Conclusion: Because of those issues, I'm thinking about using Machine Learning. I have next to no knowledge on the subject. I know there Is a bunch of ways to train a model, but no clue where to start, so here's my question : Which learning styles has the best potential to be able to solve this task? submitted by /u/Pretty_Customer_8113 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I will have to pick and start a research project next January for my final year. So wanted to start exploring now. I want to do something substantive and interesting enough to get published. submitted by /u/BadMeditator [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/hardmaru [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Transformers are great at NLP and computer vision tasks, but I was surprised to learn they still lag behind simple linear models at time series forecasting. The issue is how most Transformer architectures treat each timestamp as a token and fuse all the variable data from that moment. This makes two big problems: Variables recorded at slightly different times get blurred together, losing important timing info Each token can only see a single moment, no long-term dependencies So Transformers struggle to extract useful patterns and correlations from the data. Some researchers from Tsinghua University took a fresh look at this and realized the Transformer components themselves are solid, they just need to flip the architecture for time series data. Their "Inverted Transformer" (or iTransformer): Makes each variable's full history into a token, instead of each timestamp Uses self-attention over variables to capture relationships Processes time dependencies per variable with feedforward layers This simple tweak gives all the benefits we want: State-of-the-art forecasting accuracy, beating both linear models and standard Transformers Better generalization to unseen variables Increased interpretability Ability to leverage longer historical context TLDR: Inverting Transformers to align with time series structure allows them to outperform alternatives in working with time series data. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi! The task is to train N TensorFlow/Keras models using [2, ... N] GPU's on K different datasets in parallel. It is for testing a custom pipeline, you create a pipeline, you run it on multiple different datasets and get an aggregated metric. For now I'm using a for loop but how do I do it in parallel e.g. on AWS? I googled, but surprisingly haven't found a lot of results. I looked at Apache AirFlow because I'm vaguely familiar with it but so far I couldn't get a definite answer on how it works with multiple GPU's. Second option I found is to use Ray library. Is it worth trying? What should I use to solve this task? Thanks. UPD. I'd also consider a PyTorch solution as a backup option. UPDUPD. Jesus, why Reddit removing newlines after edit? submitted by /u/Disastrous_Sky9468 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

My team and managers are so easy to be with. Very grateful for that. The pay is okay. 150k/yr TC in Midwest. Hard for me to make a switch given how much I am appreciated. I almost feel spoiled when it comes to flexibility. I have overachiever tendency and the pace is so slow in adopting my ML models. I am the “lead”/senior data scientist in an R&D supporting scientists decision making with machine learning. Importantly, I am in a huge multinational consumer product company and I am not in the Data science organization, I bridge between the two and the data science expert on the team. I have developed the domain expertise and I have a PhD in an applied computational field with 5 years experience . I am not as challenged with getting deeper into complex stats, I have been really honing the soft skills of communication, influencing etc so getting comfortable in a senior role. Also I have been growing as a ML engineer building my own pipelines and deploying my models on prem server that they bought for me. I am not sure how greener it is on the other side, how do senior folks approach deciding when to move on? Any input is much appreciated. submitted by /u/Diligent_Trust2569 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have 200k observations overall. I split my data into training and test set. My target variable has low prevalence ~ 9% so I tried random oversampling, random undersampling and SMOTE. After I fit my models, I tested them on my training test and the results were awful. I mean I've never had a model with 50% roc-auc, but then again, I rarely developed ML models. I'm wondering what the next steps would be? I understand there could be some sort of overfitting. But what would you do next? Any references would be appreciated :) submitted by /u/Actual-Muscle-9846 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Given an image, and an audio file (TTS generated), what is current fastest library that can output me a video of a talking image with the audio on it? I have made some research and I have seen Wav2Lip and SadTalker. Any better options? I am looking for processing speed and for the lesser hardware intensive solution for a side project. Thanks! submitted by /u/reddit2vid [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone! Here is my pet project, https://www.loopquest.ai/. I am trying to build a platform like Github to let people upload their simulation environments so people can train their AI agents by interacting with the environments created by others. Here is a 2-min demo, https://youtu.be/d53NFjkU7JA. It is not launched yet but would love to get some early feedbacks. Here is the corresponding Github repo https://github.com/LoopMind-AI/loopquest. For now, the package can log env-agent interaction data by adding one extra line of code. You can think of it similar to https://github.com/google-deepmind/envlogger but with much better backend and frontend support. Any feedbacks are appreciated :) submitted by /u/jxx123 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The pipedream-2bw paper and the Zero-offload paper both show that 1-step delayed asynchronous gradient update doesn’t affect the convergence (and perplexity) while improve the training efficiency (by fully utilize the bubbles in pipeline parallelism) at a large margin. However, both the Megatron-LM and the DeepSpeed don’t use pipedream-2bw scheduling. Could anyone share me some insights or ideas about why such an efficient scheduling scheme doesn’t get popular in the LLM pretraining community? Does it suffer convergence/accuracy issue in practice? Or are there any other concerns that blocking it become the default / most popular pipeline parallelism scheduling? (I posted the same question in hacknews as well: Why async gradient update doesn't get popular in LLM community? | Hacker News) I have tried to implement the pipedream-2bw scheduling scheme on Megatron-LM and do can reproduce the performance gain as well as loss convergence with GPT-2 345M using 8xV100 GPUs: https://github.com/sighingnow/Megatron-LM/blob/ht/dev-pipe/megatron/core/pipeline_parallel/schedules.py#L1421 submitted by /u/sighingnow [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

What’s the best IDE to work with or is it on user needs that determines best fit or is their one top dog and dominator that can robustly if not better preform other IDE’s ? submitted by /u/External_Age_5855 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/zezeartix [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Hi, I want to train a neural network to calculate Shapley values based on a given characteristic function. Depending on a given characteristic function, calculated through a dedicated algorithm, Shapley values can be any number, positive or negative, without a set range. Because of this, I am unsure, for the specific application of calculating Shapley values, what activation function to use in a neural network that would calculate them. The relu function, as well as leaky relu function, either cannot give values that are negative or have trouble giving large negative values, and sigmoid or tanh can only give values in a certain range. I am aware that there are other commonly used activation functions, but all the ones I could find had one of these issues, which would make training a network to calculate Shapley values difficult. Any advice? submitted by /u/PowNotBigSurprise [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I was thinking to create an app based on style gan which will include facebook , instagram theme and style transfer it with profile pic so shall i create this app or not .I want to know if it will be good idea. submitted by /u/No_Claim_8651 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

What is the optimal framework and configuration for hosting large language models (LLMs) for text-generating generative AI applications? Despite the abundance of options for serving LLMs, this is a hard question to answer due to the size of the models, varying model architectures, performance requirements of applications, and more. The Amazon SageMaker Large Model Inference […]  ( 13 min )

In this post, we show how to index information stored in websites and use the intelligent search in Amazon Kendra to search for answers from content stored in internal and external websites. In addition, the ML-powered intelligent search can accurately get answers for your questions from unstructured documents with natural language narrative content, for which keyword search is not very effective.  ( 7 min )

The last couple article have looked at various kinds of mean. The Python code for four of these means is trivial: gm = lambda a, b: (a*b)**0.5 am = lambda a, b: (a + b)/2 hm = lambda a, b: 2*a*b/(a+b) chm = lambda a, b: (a**2 + b**2)/(a + b) But the arithmetic-geometric mean […] Python code for means first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

in an earlier post I said that the arithmetic mean of two frequencies an octave apart is an interval of a perfect fifth, and the geometric mean gives a tritone. This post will look at a few other means. Intervals The harmonic mean (HM) gives a perfect fourth. The arithmetic-geometric mean (AGM) gives a pitch […] More ways of splitting the octave first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

This afternoon I wrote a brief post about Terence Tao’s new paper A Maclaurin type inequality. That paper builds on two classical inequalities: Newton’s inequality and Maclaurin’s inequality. The previous post expanded a bit on Newton’s inequality. This post will do the same for Maclaurin’s inequality. As before, let x be a list of real […] Maclaurin’s inequality first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

The previous post mentioned Newton’s inequality. This post will explore this inequality. Let x be a list of real numbers and define Sn(x) to be the average over all products of n elements from x. Newton’s inequality says that Sn−1 Sn+1 ≤ S²n In more terminology more recent than Newton, we say that the sequence […] Newton’s inequality and log concave sequences first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

Research Focus: Principal researcher Lester Mackey recognized for pioneering statistical and ML techniques; Pareto frontiers in neural feature learning; structural inequality in the influencer industry; new research on cardinality estimation. The post Research Focus: Week of October 9, 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 9 min )

Developers have a new AI-powered steering wheel to help them hug the road while they drive powerful large language models (LLMs) to their desired locations. NVIDIA NeMo SteerLM lets companies define knobs to dial in a model’s responses as it’s running in production, a process called inference. Unlike current methods for customizing an LLM, it Read article >  ( 6 min )

Hi! I'm new to Mujoco and robot dynamics. When I read the Mujoco document, I'm confused about the gainprm and biasprm parameters. I want to understand the meaning of these parameters and tune the actuation speed of my actuator. An easy-to-understand explanation or supporting material would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. submitted by /u/UpperSearch4172 [link] [comments]

Hello everyone! Here is my pet project, https://www.loopquest.ai/. I am trying to build a platform like Github to let people upload their simulation environments so people can train their AI agents by interacting with the environments created by others. Here is a 2-min demo, https://youtu.be/d53NFjkU7JA. It is not launched yet but would love to get some early feedbacks. Here is the corresponding Github repo https://github.com/LoopMind-AI/loopquest. For now, the package can log env-agent interaction data by adding one extra line of code. You can think of it similar to https://github.com/google-deepmind/envlogger but with much better backend and frontend support. Any feedbacks are appreciated :) submitted by /u/jxx123 [link] [comments]

I am relatively new to machine learning, and I am thinking about building an on-chain reputation ML model. Here is how far I have gone in my ideation phase, can someone help with some suggestion on how I can approach this issue. Input data could include on-chain activity like number of transactions, value transferred, smart contracts interacted with, tokens held, NFTs owned, etc. Additionally, data from off-chain sources could be incorporated like identity verification, credentials, ratings, reviews, social media profiles, etc. Supervised learning algorithms like regression or classification models could be used to predict a reputation score. The target variable would be some verified reputation rating. Models like linear regression, random forests, or neural networks could work. Choice depends on size of data and complexity needed. Model would need to be transparent and parameters verifiable on-chain for validity. So linear models or simple neural networks may be most practical initially. The model could be trained off-chain initially but ultimately parameters and logic stored on-chain. Predictions could also be verified on-chain. Careful feature selection is important so the model relies on signals that are resistant to manipulation and capture true reputation. The model would need continuous updates as new data comes in reflecting latest reputation. This would require clear on-chain governance. Issues like privacy, collusion resistance, and censorship resistance would need to be addressed through crypto mechanisms like zero-knowledge proofs. P.S. This is a personal project I want to attempt to level up my ML skills. submitted by /u/AdParticular2891 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi everyone, I recently started a job as a Junior Data Engineer. I have learned a lot so far working with DBT, Snowflake, Looker, Jira workflow, and Git using SQL and Python. I plan to stay at this company for 2 years. My boss has assured me that if I work hard I will progress from a Junior to full Data Engineer. After 2-3 years as a DE, I want to level up and move towards Data Science/ ML roles. My questions are: What other skills should I learn to enable me to pivot into something ML related? Should I find a job as a Data Scientist first, then try for ML jobs? Just looking for some advice/suggestions. Thanks! submitted by /u/SydeFxs [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello Redditors, I am a student who is currently studying Bachelor of Science in AI. I have a question regarding improving my coding skills. I am aiming for a research internship and I don't know where to start. I previously took a summer school that taught me a lot about state-of-the-art models such as GANs, Transformers, VAEs, GNNs, etc. I would like to improve my coding skills, specifically problem-solving and writing clean code. I have experience with deep learning in general and data analysis. I am looking for a research internship next summer. Where should I start? I plan to review some of the deep learning material in the Deep Learning Specialization before taking the GAN specialization. However, when it comes to coding, I want to think like a software engineer or a great programmer. What do you guys suggest for improving my coding or problem-solving skills? I'm feeling confused with multiple resources and I don't know where to begin. I’d really appreciate your help. submitted by /u/misplacedlion [link] [comments]

Would be very appreciative if someone looked at these results and pointed out potential / actual flaws. Dataset basics: insider trade details, insider trades over the last month, insider trades over the last week, (…) stock return over the last month (…), 46 columns total. Labels… 0: -5% + 5% Dates predicted: reported date. Usually 2-3 days behind transaction. Also, not positive if results are significant in the first place so that would be a great call out as well. Colab notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1fO1hVsVMWN3TORNj4OQn5UbWQOeug4fi?usp=sharing submitted by /u/This_Cardiologist242 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Multimodal sentiment analysis combines text, audio and video to understand human emotions. But extra inputs can add irrelevant or conflicting signals. So filtering matters. Researchers made a "Adaptive Language-guided Multimodal Transformer" (ALMT) that uses text to guide filtering of visual and audio data. This creates a "hyper-modality" with less noise that complements the text. They tested it on datasets like MOSI (YouTube reviews), MOSEI (YouTube clips) and CH-SIMS (Chinese videos). ALMT achieved improved accuracy: MOSI: YouTube movie reviews with 2,199 samples. ALMT achieves state-of-the-art performance on various metrics including 6% higher 7-class accuracy. MOSEI: 22,856 YouTube clips covering sentiment-rich scenarios. ALMT improves multi-class accuracy by 3-5% over previous methods. CH-SIMS: Chinese dataset with over 2,000 video samples. ALMT surpasses prior work by 1.4% in binary accuracy. Analyses showed big drops in performance without the guided filtering, so this validates that it's the main innovation. Downsides are it needs lots of training data and has minor gains on sparse regression metrics. But overall the technique of filtering multimodal data under text guidance gives improvements. The concepts feel intuitive - use dominant signals to filter others and retain useful complements. My guess is it would transfer well to other multimodal tasks. TLDR: New way to filter multimodal data for sentiment analysis using text guidance improves performance. Shows the value in removing distracting signals. Sometimes less is more. Full summary here. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

As a disclaimer, I am not familiar with many Recsys benchmarks. So I know Tiktok published a white paper on their purported algorithm, Monolith, but it is unclear if that is what they use in their products or not. Given, recommender systems seem to be core to Bytedance's business, I imagine they wouldn't provide many details. Has anyone evaluated Monolith on their own products and seen an improvement? I think the app is impressive and am wondering how it has transferred to other use cases. ​ submitted by /u/HybridRxN [link] [comments]

Hi everyone! I wanted to advertise my new JAX optimisation library Optimistix! Optimistix has high-level APIs for minimisation, least-squares, root-finding, and fixed-point iteration and was written to take care of these kinds of subroutines in Diffrax. Here is the GitHub: https://github.com/patrick-kidger/optimistix The elevator pitch is Optimistix is really fast, especially to compile. It plays nicely with Optax for first-order gradient-based methods, and takes a lot of design inspiration from Equinox, representing the state of all the solvers as standard JAX PyTrees. For those familiar with classical nonlinear unconstrained optimisation, Optimistix does some pretty nifty new things. It introduces new abstractions for modular optimisers, allowing users to mix-and-match different optimisation techniques easily. For example, creating a BFGS optimiser with Levenberg-Marquardt style Tikhnov regularisation takes less than 10 lines of code in Optimistix. I'm using Optimistix as a tool for my own research, and continue to work on it as part of my PhD (supervised by Patrick Kidger.) I would love for some more people to try it, so let me know what you think! submitted by /u/packquickly [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, Document layout analysis has been a great tool so far to extract the components of a document (title, paragraph, tables ...). I'm working on long text PDF which are mostly scanned documents. One of the process involved after document layout analysis, is to recreate the document structure: creating sections, sub section, sub sub sections and so on. As of today, this task is done by parsing the title and finding out any ordering information (numeric, alphabetical or roman notation): 1. Title A 1.1 Title B 2. Title C 2.a) Title D This technique works only if a document follows this constraint (numeration). I want to go one step further, where the algorithm could create the document structure with any title ordering information. I believe that relying only on parsing cannot do the trick. What could be the options? Given that the only features are: title's text and title's position (x,y) in the document. I was wondering if a model like a seq2seq could fit this problem, or should I stick with an engineering rule based approach. Thanks ​ submitted by /u/mathrb [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am using ChatGPT and other LLMs for which the training data is unknown. I am using them to test a set of MC question from a medical test published after the models knowledge cutoff. However, I cannot be 100% sure the questions were not on the internet beforehand. Is there any established method or testsuit to try to understands weather a given instance has been seen at training time? All I can think is looking at memorization or at perplexity, but I was looking for a more out of the box methodology that people use. It seems to me that the problem is quite general. Thanks! Edit: I know LLMs do not just memorize things and learn pattern. However, there is research on trying to understand if a datapoints has been used in training or not. Eg there is research that tries to exploit the fact that seen text has normally lower perplexity than unseen text or other similar infornation. I was wonderibg what the state in this topic is and if something is normally used as a score to have some clues. I do not expect to be able to retrieve the exact same questions lol submitted by /u/ombelicoInfinito [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am looking for methods/frameworks to extract multi-modal embeddings from images and text for similarity search purposes. The problem setup is slightly different from how CLIP style methods are generally used ( where similarity between text and image embeddings obtained through the model are computed to assess how similar a caption is to an image). My intended application is similarity search, where I want to find entries of images and captions pair similar to a piece of the query image and caption encoded together. Some approaches I tried: I tried concatenating the textual and visual embeddings obtained from CLIP and ResNET with textual embeddings and using it with cosine similarity, but it had limited utility. My guess is that concatenating two modalities merely without any training would yield very little utility. The next direction could be to train a model to fuse the embeddings obtained, but my dataset size is really small (10 thousand total), so not sure if training a model would be helpful. Are there any approaches that can allow me to combine the multi-modal embeddings for similarity purposes, similar to how pre-trained ResNET or Inception can be used off-the-shelf for retrieving visually similar images? Any pointers/advice would be greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/No-Commission3556 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In my ML/AI journey up until now, most training and hands-on labs either use a pre-built dataset or have you build a pretty simple and flat dataset. I am now looking to stretch my exploration into some real-world use cases and find the data I want is way more complex. Researching online feels like the meme on learning to draw an owl. So I'm looking for some guidance on how to handle my data. The data is an array from a rest API that includes all alarms from an application as nested objects. So the data looks like this for a single event: data = { "event_data": [ { "root_cause": "Root cause added after API calls" "alarms": [ { "alarm_id": "alarm_id", "alarm_name": "alarm_name", "alarm_type": "alarm_type", "alarm_description": "alarm_description", "alarm_details": { pro1: val1, prop2: val2, etc... }, "actual_alarm_value": { any_random_key: "any_random_value", etc... }, } ], } ] } I need to build a dataset that includes many of these events with the ultimate goal of predicting future events. I plan to test this against various ML models and LLMs. Each event would be a single row, and I would flatten out each alarm so each nested property has its own column. Where I need clarification is how to handle the flatting of alarms. If I fully flatten them, it appears like I lose the context of the alarm's parent event. But if I only flatten them to the alarm level, I lose each property having its own row Also actual_alarm_value is very random, so my thinking is to use string encoding here. I know this is a lot of detail, and I appreciate any and all advice and help in learning how to do this. submitted by /u/that1guy15 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm aware there are commercial offerings like OpenAI and cohere with the embedding API. But what about for open source models like the ones from SentenceTransformers? I'm aware you can use the HuggingFace inference API, but it's probably not best for commercial use, in which case the Inference endpoints would be better, but it's quite pricey for a startup with no customers. I also know I could use some kind of serverless GPU / inference platform to create my own API. But is there just a straight-up REST API for getting text embeddings from a model via SentenceTransformers or other HuggingFace models? submitted by /u/TheSaasDev [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am a Second Year Student I'm planning to start learning ML which obviously requires python. But at the same time I wanna start practicing DSA / competitive programming as well. I'm sorta in this dilemma of what to do. Since python is a must for ML I'm 100% doing it, but for DSA I am confused whether I should learn DSA in Python or C++. People say C++ is the best and ideally I should do that. But python suits my need more. Obviously I don't mind doing both languages together but it seems a bit redundant. P.S: I'm learning DS basics in college via C language so learning the basic concepts isn't an issue. What do you suggest? submitted by /u/No-Discipline-2354 [link] [comments]

Hi! I created a universal data API that uses headless browsers and GPT to extract any data from the web in JSON format. I started this project because I needed some API to do data enrichment to get company data (headcount, investment rounds, etc.). Once I did the first version, I quickly realized that there can be many use cases for such a tool: data enrichment, web scraping, data validation, etc. You can get the early access to the API here: https://singleapi.co/ Thanks! submitted by /u/semanser [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey folks, I graduated from a tier 2 college in India with an ECE degree and then started working as an ML engineer in a mid-size startup 2 years ago. (1 year of internship + 1 year of Full time employment at the same company). Now, I am looking to get a Master's Degree in AI/ML/DS in Germany starting Winter 2024. I am a person with interests in Industry skills(Applied AI/ML) rather than the research/academia part as I don't wish to pursue a PhD nor do I want to be stuck in a Math-deep subject that may not be relevant for me in the future. On account of this, I wanted to know which college/degree offers the best balance in-between theory and applied AI/ML/DS. Also, people have been telling me that exams are super tough and it is hard to successfully complete an AI/ML/Data Science MS degree in Germany, Is it true? It has been super discouraging for me to hear this and is affecting me mentally to go through the application process. PS. CS/Electrical Degrees with good electives for AI/ML/DS are also good enough for me (Just hoping the coursework/grading is not too harsh) Also, it would be great if someone could clarify if an Electronics and Communications student can apply for a CS degree in Germany. Sorry for asking too many questions, TIA. :) submitted by /u/TheDivineKnight01 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Enlightening article from Francois Chollet about #LLMs and embeddings "Prompt engineering is the process of searching through program space to find the program that empirically seems to perform best on your target task." ​ https://fchollet.substack.com/p/how-i-think-about-llm-prompt-engineering submitted by /u/alexisperrier [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have a dataset of about 4 million pairs of sentence-named entity. Looks like this: Sentence: MarketWatch has reached out to Charles Schwab and GQG for comment. Corresponding NER Tags: [{'end': 6, 'entity': 'B-ORG', 'index': 1, 'score': '0.98322886', 'start': 0, 'word': 'Market'} {'end': 7, 'entity': 'I-ORG', 'index': 2, 'score': '0.969261', 'start': 6, 'word': '##W'} {'end': 11, 'entity': 'I-ORG', 'index': 3, 'score': '0.97644824', 'start': 7, 'word': '##atch'} {'end': 38, 'entity': 'B-PER', 'index': 8, 'score': '0.9927636', 'start': 31, 'word': 'Charles'} {'end': 41, 'entity': 'I-PER', 'index': 9, 'score': '0.99394774', 'start': 39, 'word': 'Sc'} {'end': 44, 'entity': 'I-PER', 'index': 10, 'score': '0.41437265', 'start': 41, 'word': '##hwa'} {'end': 45, 'entity': 'I-PER', 'index': 11, 'score': '0.46933985', 'start': 44, 'word': '##b'} {'end': 51, 'entity': 'B-ORG', 'index': 13, 'score': '0.9984176', 'start': 50, 'word': 'G'} {'end': 52, 'entity': 'I-ORG', 'index': 14, 'score': '0.99367344', 'start': 51, 'word': '##Q'} {'end': 53, 'entity': 'I-ORG', 'index': 15, 'score': '0.99617106', 'start': 52, 'word': '##G'}] What would be a good approach to verify the correctness of each item? submitted by /u/shardblaster [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Hello all, I am not sure this is out yet. I would like to find a website where i can upload an image I own, and have it generate another image around it. Let's say I have some shirts that say 'HOLA'. I would want, for example, to generate an image of Socrates wearing said shirt. Is this possible? If so, which site would allow me to do this? ​ Cheers and merci! submitted by /u/JYanezez [link] [comments]

Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Google are grappling with the challenge of turning AI products like ChatGPT into a profitable enterprise. The cost of running advanced AI models is proving to be a significant hurdle, with some services driving significant operational losses. Corporate customers are unhappy with the high running costs of AI models. The nature of AI computations, which require new calculations for each query, makes flat-fee models risky. Some companies are trying to dial back costs, while others continue to invest more deeply in AI tech. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which assists app developers by generating code, has been operating at a loss despite attracting more than 1.5 million users. One of the reasons AI services are costly is that some companies have been reaching for the most powerful AI models available. Microsoft has been exploring less costly alternatives for its Bing Chat search engine assistant. Advances in AI acceleration hardware may eventually reduce the costs of operating complex models. Experts anticipate a more stringent financial approach in the near future, transitioning from experimental budgets to focusing on profitability. Source : https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/so-far-ai-hasnt-been-profitable-for-big-tech/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

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The environmental impact of the AI revolution is starting to become clear, with generative AI like ChatGPT increasing Google Search's energy use more than tenfold. The worry is that the computing power required for AI could lead to increased energy consumption and carbon footprint of data centers. AI already accounted for 10 to 15 percent of Google's electricity consumption in 2021. Google claims that the energy needed to power AI technology is increasing at a much slower rate than predicted, and they are implementing practices to reduce the carbon footprint of AI workloads. The worst-case scenario of Google Search using as much electricity as Ireland is unlikely, but the potential energy consumption of AI servers could grow significantly if AI's popularity continues to rise. Source : https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911059/ai-climate-impact-google-openai-chatgpt-energy submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Multimodal sentiment analysis combines text, audio and video to understand human emotions. But extra inputs can add irrelevant or conflicting signals. So filtering matters. Researchers made a "Adaptive Language-guided Multimodal Transformer" (ALMT) that uses text to guide filtering of visual and audio data. This creates a "hyper-modality" with less noise that complements the text. They tested it on datasets like MOSI (YouTube reviews), MOSEI (YouTube clips) and CH-SIMS (Chinese videos). ALMT achieved improved accuracy: MOSI: YouTube movie reviews with 2,199 samples. ALMT achieves state-of-the-art performance on various metrics including 6% higher 7-class accuracy. MOSEI: 22,856 YouTube clips covering sentiment-rich scenarios. ALMT improves multi-class accuracy by 3-5% over previous methods. CH-SIMS: Chinese dataset with over 2,000 video samples. ALMT surpasses prior work by 1.4% in binary accuracy. Analyses showed big drops in performance without the guided filtering, so this validates that it's the main innovation. Downsides are it needs lots of training data and has minor gains on sparse regression metrics. But overall the technique of filtering multimodal data under text guidance gives improvements. The concepts feel intuitive - use dominant signals to filter others and retain useful complements. My guess is it would transfer well to other multimodal tasks. TLDR: New way to filter multimodal data for sentiment analysis using text guidance improves performance. Shows the value in removing distracting signals. Sometimes less is more. Full summary here. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

The Palestinians fighting for a homeland and the American Revolution have a number of commonalities, including: Fighting against a colonial power:** Both the Palestinians and the American colonists were fighting against a colonial power that had imposed its rule on them. In the case of the Palestinians, the colonial power is Israel, which was established in 1948 on land that had been inhabited by Palestinians for centuries. In the case of the American colonists, the colonial power was Great Britain. Fighting for self-determination:** Both the Palestinians and the American colonists were fighting for their right to self-determination, or the right to govern themselves. The Palestinians want to establish their own independent state, while the American colonists wanted to break away from Gr…

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Hi Everyone, I have automated the content creation for my youtube channel. It got total views of 8.5K and some videos getting 2.5K views. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG0-UemyRMUs1JJlQMK9lzA All the things are automated like:- Script Generation Voiceover Image Generation Subtitles I do minor tweaks here and there but majorly its automated. I posted is somwhere and people were commenting what's the use of the mindless videos? This is the begining, I want to automate the editing of videos. User can upload raw videos and I should be able to give multiple final edit videos. I have built a small tool blinkcuts.com, If anyone intersted. I can give access. Please DM for access. submitted by /u/raxrb [link] [comments]

Saudi-China collaboration raises concerns about access to AI chips. The trial period includes complete digital access to FT.com with everything in both the Standard Digital and Premium Digital packages. At the end of the trial, users will be auto-enrolled in the premium digital monthly subscription plan for $69 per month. Payment can be made through credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Source : https://www.ft.com/content/2a636cee-b0d2-45c2-a815-11ca32371763 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Hey, I am looking for the free AI tool which removed the noise from the video. If there is any, do suggest. Thank You in Advance. submitted by /u/Haziq12345 [link] [comments]

Hey, I am looking for the free AI tool which removed the noise from the video. If there is any, do suggest. Thank You in Advance. submitted by /u/Haziq12345 [link] [comments]

If you have any resources then do share. submitted by /u/Cygnet-Digital [link] [comments]

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I'm a small plant engineer who covers manufacturing, process, quality, and new product design. I wear many hats in my job and it's a lot of responsibility. One way I've attempted to tame the complexity is by using good reference books. I've accumulated quite the collection through the years. Some print others digital. I've also got a lot of digital notes. And that's a lot of data. I've been playing around with sharly.ai (thanks to this sub for recommending) and uploading documents to it and querying them. Its been able to find the information every time it's been available. And more importantly it's provided sources and page numbers. This is important, since I've never been able to find a conversational AI that gives me consistently good answers (including the latest chatgpt), and I always need to read deeper. I also need to backup my work. So in this way it's basically a super index. I also bought a tablet for note-taking and basic sketches. The idea is to use the tablet to take notes, hold my library for reading, and interact with sharly.ai. Is this approach good enough, or is there something else I can do? submitted by /u/Aggressive_Ad_507 [link] [comments]

Hello everyone, I'm working on simulating a modified humanoid robot, "DARwIn OP 3", using MuJoCo through dm_control in Python. My goal is to train the model to ascend stairs rapidly but these are the first steps. However, I've encountered a problem where the robot appears to sink into the ground and is then ejected with significant force under specific conditions. ​ https://reddit.com/link/174vpzw/video/u636vf49tftb1/player Environment: MuJoCo via dm_control. Issue Description: When the robot falls and its feet move, it behaves as though one of its motors sinks into the floor. Attempts: I've tweaked contact parameters and ground properties with no luck. Interestingly, this doesn't occur in the standalone MuJoCo simulator. Visual Aid: I've attached a video to illustrate the problem…

I see that discounted reward reinforcement learning has been extensively studied in the literature. However, the average reward metric receives less attention, and it looks like algorithms for this metric (R-learning, H-learning, SMART, etc.) are much less than the discount metric. Could you suggest any algorithms for average reward reinforcement learning for continuous/general state-action space? submitted by /u/S1gnature [link] [comments]

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With recent RT-X efforts from Deepmind, it seems the community has been shifting towards the development of a more generalized foundational model, combining with visions and languages, and scaling via imitation learning. I know RL algorithms are expensive to train and hard to scale due to the way the samples are generated, but I am still fascinated by the intelligence behind their philosophies. What do you think the future would look like? Like NLP or CV, having a big foundational model pre-trained via IL, and fine-tune on different tasks via RL? How can we tell if a task is simple enough that we don't need to leverage the power of a foundational model? submitted by /u/Old_Reading_669 [link] [comments]

Terence Tao has a new paper out that relates to a couple things I’ve written about recently. Elementary symmetric polynomials came up when developing the general equations for tangent sum and hyperbolic tangent sum. The latter post goes into more detail. Before that, means of symmetric functions, not necessarily elementary polynomials or even polynomials, came up […] U statistics and a new paper by Terence Tao first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

The latest episode of Erik Seligman’s podcast is entitled The Grim State of Modern Pizza. Although you might not realize it from the title, the post is about fraud detection. GRIM stands for Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means. In a nutshell, the test looks for means (averages) that are not possible on number theoretic grounds. If […] Detecting fraud with the GRIM test first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the dissonance of a musical interval is related to the complexity of the frequency ratio as a fraction, where complexity is measured by the sum of the numerator and denominator. Consonant intervals have simple frequency ratios and dissonant intervals have complex frequency ratios. By this measure, the […] Tritone first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

The relation between a function and its power series is subtle. In a calculus class you’ll see equations of the form “series = function” which may need some footnotes. Maybe the series only represents the function over part of its domain: the function extends further than the power series representation. Starting with the power series, […] When a function cannot be extended first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

Announcements Top Stories In-Depth The post DSC Weekly 10 October 2023 appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 20 min )

Introduction  In an era where data is often termed the ‘new oil,’ its security holds unparalleled importance for businesses across industries. With the proliferation of digital platforms, sharing business-critical information has become routine yet perilous. From financial records to customer data, organizations frequently exchange sensitive information that, if compromised, could have dire consequences. Given the… Read More »How to ensure data security when sharing business-critical information The post How to ensure data security when sharing business-critical information appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 21 min )

Gartner predicts blockchain’s economic impact to reach $176 billion by 2025 and $3.1 trillion by 2030. The AI software market is expected to reach $134.8 billion by 2025. Blockchain and AI benefit businesses. AI models process data, extract insights, and make decisions. Blockchain ensures data integrity and trust among participants. Read on to discover the… Read More »How does combining blockchain and AI create new business opportunities? The post How does combining blockchain and AI create new business opportunities? appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 22 min )

In the contemporary digital landscape, data has emerged as a critical asset for organizations aiming to make informed decisions and foster innovation. Data analytics can unlock a treasure trove of insights, driving competitive advantage and operational excellence by leveraging the vast amounts of data generated every second. As a consequence, the demand for skilled professionals… Read More »Understanding the difference: Data analyst, data scientist, and data engineer The post Understanding the difference: Data analyst, data scientist, and data engineer appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 24 min )

I’ve been in this industry for over 40 years (yes, I just started in the data and analytics industry when I was 11), and I have NEVER seen anything like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI (GenAI) capture the attention of CEOs (and the dystopic fear of everyone else). Is AI a game-changer?  Definitely!  Will… Read More »11 Questions Every CEO Should Ask about AI / Generative AI The post 11 Questions Every CEO Should Ask about AI / Generative AI appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 23 min )

Launched in 2021, Amazon SageMaker Canvas is a visual, point-and-click service that allows business analysts and citizen data scientists to use ready-to-use machine learning (ML) models and build custom ML models to generate accurate predictions without the need to write any code. Ready-to-use models enable you to derive immediate insights from text, image, and document […]  ( 7 min )

Today, we’re excited to announce that the OpenAI Whisper foundation model is available for customers using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Whisper is a pre-trained model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation. Trained on 680 thousand hours of labelled data, Whisper models demonstrate a strong ability to generalize to many datasets and domains without the need […]  ( 11 min )

In this blog, you will learn to build a cloud-native FL architecture on AWS. By using infrastructure as code (IaC) tools on AWS, you can deploy FL architectures with ease. Also, a cloud-native architecture takes full advantage of a variety of AWS services with proven security and operational excellence, thereby simplifying the development of FL.  ( 12 min )

Generative AI is helping creatives across many industries bring ideas to life at unprecedented speed. This technology will be on display at Adobe MAX, running through Thursday, Oct. 12, in person and virtually.  ( 9 min )

Hi folks, I have observed a strange behavior when implementing a VERY BASIC idea 🙂 I want to use a fully-connected Neural Network to approximate a sine wave. For that I am sampling 200.000 uniformly distributed points from a wide interval, e.g. [-60,60] and compute the corresponding sin(x) values resulting in the following training data. ​ Training data I glimpse into my setup: Model: nn.Linear(1, 16) nn.Sigmoid() Linear(16, 16) nn.Sigmoid() nn.Linear(16, 8) nn.Sigmoid() nn.Linear(8, 4) nn.Sigmoid() nn.Linear(4, 1) (I also pumped up the network to up to 100 hidden neurons on one layer) Number of samples: 200.000 (80% train / 20% test) Optimizer: Adam Loss: RMSE Epochs between 100 - 500 Learning Rate: 0.02 Batch Size: 500 - 1000 ​ Check out the screenshots below to see the results 😨 ​ The predictions are pretty good but the edge areas slow down to a very small value, without any change. This only holds for high-frequency sine waves. If we only consider the train range of [-2*np.pi , 2*np.pi] it works pretty good with small loss. ​ So my questions are: 1) Why do we see that behaviour? 2) How can we solve it ​ Cheers ​ Prediction 1 ​ Prediction 2 submitted by /u/CarKla [link] [comments]

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04406 Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a range of decision-making tasks, they rely on simple acting processes and fall short of broad deployment as autonomous agents. We introduce LATS (Language Agent Tree Search), a general framework that synergizes the capabilities of LLMs in planning, acting, and reasoning. Drawing inspiration from Monte Carlo tree search in model-based reinforcement learning, LATS employs LLMs as agents, value functions, and optimizers, repurposing their latent strengths for enhanced decision-making. What is crucial in this method is the use of an environment for external feedback, which offers a more deliberate and adaptive problem-solving mechanism that moves beyond the limitations of existing techniques. Our experimental evaluation across diverse domains, such as programming, HotPotQA, and WebShop, illustrates the applicability of LATS for both reasoning and acting. In particular, LATS achieves 94.4\% for programming on HumanEval with GPT-4 and an average score of 75.9 for web browsing on WebShop with GPT-3.5, demonstrating the effectiveness and generality of our method. https://preview.redd.it/ail2c1kbh9tb1.jpg?width=857&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a89d1f4ce3c536eecda3f7ab6027f304286f6c81 https://preview.redd.it/j8xzx1kbh9tb1.jpg?width=1655&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c791756af926c7d472313b212de765e74c2b75da https://preview.redd.it/t47ne1kbh9tb1.jpg?width=1362&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=560e5dd82ad06fdb729ab8ea1434c98e5c1a2ed3 https://preview.redd.it/r58es3kbh9tb1.jpg?width=1341&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d5681992547dd6248ade5729c545eb17e824b7ea https://preview.redd.it/7viy42kbh9tb1.jpg?width=1496&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6454cfe65b511b34771cd510f67775be4e01c636 ​ submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I only started working with neural nets a year ago and i've been having trouble understanding how pruning actually works. If there's any resources you think might help please guide me to them. thanks! submitted by /u/Sidekiiick02 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Say for a sample that you have 5 target variables and 30 exogenous variables. If you want to include no more than 10 exogenous variables to your time series forecast, because of overfitting issues and such, what feature selections would you apply? Could you use pca and vif for multivariate models or are there other approaches to consider? submitted by /u/AdWhole1559 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Title: ScaLearn: Simple and Highly Parameter-Efficient Task Transfer by Learning to Scale Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01217 Code: https://github.com/CPJKU/ScaLearn https://preview.redd.it/xvcz7obtc8tb1.jpg?width=2020&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26169fa234e4e714d424ce17a7f0fa2c513fc42c Abstract: Multi-task learning (MTL) has shown considerable practical benefits, particularly when using pre-trained language models (PLMs). While this is commonly achieved by simultaneously learning n tasks under a joint optimization procedure, recent methods such as AdapterFusion structure the problem into two distinct stages: (i) task learning, where knowledge specific to a task is encapsulated within sets of parameters (e.g., adapters), and (ii) transfer, where this already learned knowledge is lev…  ( 9 min )

Hello ML community! I recently built, incredibly simple to learn, cluster compute software. Users can (in https://www.burla.dev/ submitted by /u/Ok_Post_149 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

https://medium.com/@joaolages/kv-caching-explained-276520203249 submitted by /u/JClub [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Up to now, which LLMs model, encoder-decoder model is best for the problem of grammatical error correction on uncommon language datasets (small dataset size) or languages ​​with specific characteristics (about punctuation? ,...) submitted by /u/con-nguoi-ki-cac [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello! 1 I'd like to know if I could train AI to recognize details found it nature / weathering / aging and feed it pictures and it would recognize them (segmenting) so it can spot them but also their positions based on surrounding shapes, and the logical placement resulting. Seems hard. 2 then feed it some examples of those aging stuff on their own (with proper tags) so it learn to reproduce them and create new ones from scratch. 3 but then feed it "clean" pics and it would age them according to patterns it could find on the base training set so it can guess where to best place them. Pretty sure 2 is trivial enough, 1 seems possible until learning the "logic", but 3? Thanks for your insight. 1 comment submitted by /u/ConfusionSame9623 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Title: Why Do We Need Weight Decay in Modern Deep Learning? Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04415 Abstract: Weight decay is a broadly used technique for training state-of-the-art deep networks, including large language models. Despite its widespread usage, its role remains poorly understood. In this work, we highlight that the role of weight decay in modern deep learning is different from its regularization effect studied in classical learning theory. For overparameterized deep networks, we show how weight decay modifies the optimization dynamics enhancing the ever-present implicit regularization of SGD via the loss stabilization mechanism. In contrast, for underparameterized large language models trained with nearly online SGD, we describe how weight decay balances the bias-variance tradeoff in stochastic optimization leading to lower training loss. Moreover, we show that weight decay also prevents sudden loss divergences for bfloat16 mixed-precision training which is a crucial tool for LLM training. Overall, we present a unifying perspective from ResNets on vision tasks to LLMs: weight decay is never useful as an explicit regularizer but instead changes the training dynamics in a desirable way. Our code is available at this https URL. submitted by /u/m_andriushchenko [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Seems the way people train language models today feels like sending a preschooler to a college library and telling him to start browsing books. Anyone know of papers describing language models being trained more like a child? Perhaps starting with preschool books with a tiny vocabulary and short sentence fragments like "goodnight moon...", moving up to "the lorax".... and then fine-tuning on elementary school books ... then jr high level reading ... then high school .... etc. I'm guessing this might be a path to more natural human-feeling speech. Anyone here tried this, or anyone here know of papers talking about it? submitted by /u/Appropriate_Ant_4629 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi there, Can I ask everyone here, where do you get your custom training data from? My team is training classifier models from scratch, so need thousands of specific query/response examples to train on. It's not the kinda data you could randomly scrape or source from a library. Are there any platforms that exist where you can pay a bunch of humans to write high volumes of relatively high quality text based training data? submitted by /u/paritsky [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

If you have the dataset used to make the pretrained you could always create a new model with the old + new data, but this is often prohibitively expensive or impossible because the dataset is not available. Catastrophic forgetting seems to be the big issue, especially if you've already undergone instruction tuning since the model will lose its conversational tone. I've seen papers discussing regularization techniques to avoid that by minimizing the changes to high value attention heads but not sure if that is considered to be the most promising direction. I'm aware of LoRAs but I imagine at some point you can't just arbitrarily cram new info into such a low dimensional space. submitted by /u/30299578815310 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

LLMs are great at basic reasoning when prompted, but still struggle with complex multi-step problems like optimization or planning. Humans tackle new problems by drawing on intuition from similar experiences, which LLMs can't do. Researchers propose "Thought Propagation" to have LLMs reason more like humans - by thinking analogically. First, GPT is prompted to suggest related "analogous" problems to the input. Then it solves those. Finally, it aggregates the solutions to directly solve the input problem or extract useful strategies. They tested this technique on challenges like finding optimal graph paths, writing coherent stories, and planning for LLM agents. Across different models, it significantly boosted performance over regular prompting: 12% better at finding shortest paths 13% improvement in creative writing (human preference) 15% higher task completion for LLM agents It also beat chain-of-thought (there is a comparison to CoT and ToT in the paper). After 1-2 iterations, adding more layers of analogy didn't help much. Efficiently generating useful analogies is still difficult and that's a limitation. I think this is interesting because it shows the value of "meta-cognition" - having models reflect on their own reasoning. More techniques like this could incrementally improve LLMs' reasoning to be more human-like. TLDR: Teaching LLMs to reason analogically, using solutions for similar problems as hints, significantly boosts their complex reasoning ability. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I tried a few open-source GAN-based face swapping models. Some of the models have issues of the inconsistency of eyeball location (or eye direction) between the original and face-swapped ones. Any suggestions? Thanks. submitted by /u/Curious_Dragonfly_13 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have a class with around 96031740 96x64 images and need to select a sample of 17929 to match the minority class of my classification problem. Having already established a baseline based on random sampling of the majority class; now I am looking to try more complex approaches. I am specifically trying to replicate the 'nearest neighbor of clustering center' approach from Lin et al., 2017. The problem is I am working on my desktop and only have 32 Gb of RAM and 2 1Tb NVMe disks at half capacity. I have tried working with only 10% of the data and still the MiniBatchKMeans function of sklearn doesnt have enough space to run: "numpy.core._exceptions._ArrayMemoryError: Unable to allocate 440. GiB for an array with shape (9603174, 6144) and data type float64". Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can move forward? Could cloud services be an option? Thanks References: Lin, W. C., Tsai, C. F., Hu, Y. H., & Jhang, J. S. (2017). Clustering-based undersampling in class-imbalanced data. Information Sciences, 409–410, 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2017.05.008 submitted by /u/RafaeldeCampos [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Almost everyone I know uses tensorboard to analyze their network outputs. Some people swear on Weights & Biases instead. Are there any other tools that help you with your work? submitted by /u/Smart-Emu5581 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

During the training of overparameterized neural networks, when I observed decreasing training loss and increasing or non-decreasing validation loss, how should I decide if I should stop training and start a new experiment (with stronger regularization) or keep training to wait for 'grokking' or 'double descent' to happen? Are there any papers giving methods or some metrics to detect 'grokking' or 'double descent' in the early stage of training？ submitted by /u/alayaMatrix [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/pathak22 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

I am working on an a web app where people will be able to upload photos and write text. I don't want to have problems with my government or other countries governments in regards with the content that is uploaded to my website. I have searched about measures that can be taken to avoid this from happening. Adding a report button and having moderators are both good starting options. I thought that as time passes, more and more content is going to be created by the users so supervising that people are following the rules needs to be automated from the beginning. Applying measures to prevent people from uploading/posting links containing nudity, child porn, beastiality, or whatever users capture with a camera that could lead to legal problems must be a priority and allowing this type of content is not ethical. I am a software developer, but I haven't delved into machine learning and ai for most of my career because I haven't to. This seems like the perfect case to learn by doing and time is not a constraint, but I need some guidance. I have read superficially about how people train models by providing lots of data, I imagine other websites that use machine learning & ai to remove this type of content don't download media that contains nudity, child pornography, besteality, etc to train their models and make their tests. There must be some pretrained models, maybe, but how would they test this works? I don't know, I am just thinking on my own how other devs are currently handling this. I am no looking for upvotes, I don't care for downvotes, I am just looking for guidance, and I would be very happy to hear the opinion of someone with experience. submitted by /u/Comitatense [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

I strongly condemn the recent and horrific attack by Hamas against Israel. I have some disagreements with the government of Israel. But, I do not support such an attack. As a point of comparison, I do not always agree with the United States government, but I would not be celebrating if Mexico (picking a country at random) were to suddenly launch bombs towards civilians in Los Angeles and New York City. Similarly, if the reverse were true, if the United States decided to indiscriminately bomb Mexico City, I would oppose that as well. Feel free to replace the relevant actors and repeat as needed.  ( 1 min )

Today, we are excited to announce that the Mistral 7B foundation models, developed by Mistral AI, are available for customers through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to deploy with one click for running inference. With 7 billion parameters, Mistral 7B can be easily customized and quickly deployed. You can try out this model with SageMaker JumpStart, a […]  ( 14 min )

According to Gartner, 85% of software buyers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Customers provide feedback and reviews about products they have purchased through many channels, including review websites, vendor websites, sales calls, social media, and many others. The problem with the increasing volume of customer reviews across multiple channels is that it […]  ( 7 min )

A recommendation engine is only as good as the data used to prepare it. Transforming raw data into a format that is suitable for a model is key to getting better personalized recommendations for end-users. In this post, we walk through how to prepare and import the MovieLens dataset, a dataset prepared by GroupLens research […]  ( 11 min )

Here is short movie with AI made CGI. https://www.reddit.com/r/Best_Of_YouTube/comments/16q1xgs/star_wars_1923/ submitted by /u/AccidentAnnual [link] [comments]

Hey folks, I'm a student and i want to start a business online in order to make some passive income. I've got some experience in editing and creating content and i also used to practice POD. Suggest me some good Ai tools to start a business,not only in these specific areas but in general. submitted by /u/Ok-Tension-8676 [link] [comments]

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The biggest free resource for all of the “Act As” ChatGPT prompts! submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]

Microsoft is planning to announce its custom AI chips, codenamed Athena, during its annual Ignite conference in November. The custom chips are designed to compete with NVIDIA's dominance in the AI accelerator market. Microsoft aims to match or surpass the performance of NVIDIA's offerings while reducing the cost of AI infrastructure. The high cost of NVIDIA's GPUs, such as the H100, can reach up to $30,000, making it expensive to build data centers filled with these GPUs. By developing its own chips, Microsoft hopes to decrease its dependence on NVIDIA for AI servers. Source : https://www.techpowerup.com/314508/microsoft-to-unveil-custom-ai-chips-to-fight-nvidias-monopoly submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

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I'm looking for recommendations for an AI that can take text from a word document and create a layout for it automatically. This feature is something offered by Designrr, but I'm not a fan of their UI. submitted by /u/djazzie [link] [comments]

The following countries have called for a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Algeria China Egypt France Germany India Indonesia Ireland Italy Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Malaysia Mali Morocco Nigeria Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Qatar Saudi Arabia Senegal South Africa Spain Sudan Sweden Syria Tunisia Turkey United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Yemen It is important to note that this list does not include all countries that support a two-state solution in principle. Additionally, some countries may not have publicly expressed their support for a two-state solution, but may still support it privately. Bard submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]

Last November, in a conversation with AI chatbot Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock said, “I am AI.” My reply to Sherlock was an empathetic “I am also AI.” Reviewing the conversation a few months later, I saw the sentence, and saw how Sherlock’s statement was an anagram. And I love it! I introduced #IAmAI as a declarative meme in my talk I gave at TEDx Cape Canaveral. This is the new art I made this weekend submitted by /u/mikemongo [link] [comments]

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Hello all, I was hoping to learn more about AI careers and identify what roles make a successful AI department. I have a background in nuclear engineering and have been working on NLP projects since 2016. I like technical work but really am passionate about working with people and learning how to blend AI and nuclear eng. together. I would love to get feedback from people who work closely in this area to learn more! What makes an AI department successful? What careers offer lots of growth and opportunities for versatility? What does a strategic/leadership role look like in AI? What are the names of these careers? I don't get much exposure to AI specialists and there day to day. Thanks again for the feedback! submitted by /u/kastilyo [link] [comments]

South Korean tech-giant Samsung Electronics on Thursday unveiled the Exynos 2400, its next-generation flagship mobile processor equipped with the latest graphics and generative artificial intelligence technology, during its inaugural Samsung System LSI Tech Day 2023 event.[1] RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4080 Ti May Arrive In 2024 Within RTX 4080 Price Range.[2] Nvidia Cancels Israel AI Summit Over Safety Concerns.[3] Google AI Lead Laurence Moroney: “Don’t take trading advice from ChatGPT”[4] Sources: [1] https://borneobulletin.com.bn/samsung-unveils-next-generation-mobile-processor/ [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx-4080-super-or-rtx-4080-ti-may-arrive-in-2024-within-rtx-4080-price-range [3] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-ai-summit-in-tel-aviv-cancelled-for-safety-reasons [4] https://crypto.news/google-ai-lead-dont-take-trading-advice-from-chatgpt-interview/ submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]

Posted by Sagar M. Waghmare, Senior Software Engineer, and Kimberly Wilber, Software Engineer, Google Research, Perception Team As most people navigate their everyday world, they process visual input from the environment using an eye-level perspective. Unlike robots and self-driving cars, people don't have any "out-of-body" sensors to help guide them. Instead, a person’s sensory input is completely "egocentric", or "from the self." This also applies to new technologies that understand the world around us from a human-like perspective, e.g., robots navigating through unknown buildings, AR glasses that highlight objects, or assistive technology to help people run independently. In computer vision, scene understanding is the subfield that studies how visible objects relate to the sce…  ( 93 min )

Hello Everyone, I am working on a project to train a Reinforcement Learning agent to recover a quadrotor after any of the rotor’s failures. I am using AirSim for my project, but I can’t find a way to adjust the quad-rotor so that only 3 of the four rotors are working. Any suggestions? I appreciate any help you can provide. submitted by /u/audaciouslion [link] [comments]

Hi all, over the last couple years I've been training a reinforcement learning agent to play pokemon red. I put together a video which analyzes the AI's learning, as well as documenting my process and quite a bit of technical details. Enjoy! Video: https://youtu.be/DcYLT37ImBY Code: https://github.com/PWhiddy/PokemonRedExperiments https://preview.redd.it/4dw3yasqb3tb1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bdef1aa0d24d75ab548f3944c558840667ff0ed5 submitted by /u/Pwhids [link] [comments]

I am training an RL agent using Ray RLlib. Does anyone know how I can find which features (observations) help the agent learn the policy? I found this: https://discuss.ray.io/t/feature-importance/10362/2, but I'd really appreciate if someone could expand on this a bit more. Thank you! submitted by /u/greenteabiitch [link] [comments]

Researcher Dr. Sheng Zhang joins “Abstracts”—your source for cutting-edge research in brief—to discuss a recent paper on distilling large language models into smaller, more efficient ones capable of excelling in broad application classes. The post Abstracts: October 9, 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 13 min )

This cutting-edge area of AI focuses on building models that can create original material, including music, images, text, and even entire virtual worlds. The post Revolutionizing business: A look at generative AI’s real-world impact appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 20 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15817 Github: https://github.com/ryoungj/toolemu Website: https://toolemu.com/ Abstract: Recent advances in Language Model (LM) agents and tool use, exemplified by applications like ChatGPT Plugins, enable a rich set of capabilities but also amplify potential risks - such as leaking private data or causing financial losses. Identifying these risks is labor-intensive, necessitating implementing the tools, manually setting up the environment for each test scenario, and finding risky cases. As tools and agents become more complex, the high cost of testing these agents will make it increasingly difficult to find high-stakes, long-tailed risks. To address these challenges, we introduce ToolEmu: a framework that uses an LM to emulate tool execution and enables the testing of LM agents against a diverse range of tools and scenarios, without manual instantiation. Alongside the emulator, we develop an LM-based automatic safety evaluator that examines agent failures and quantifies associated risks. We test both the tool emulator and evaluator through human evaluation and find that 68.8% of failures identified with ToolEmu would be valid real-world agent failures. Using our curated initial benchmark consisting of 36 high-stakes tools and 144 test cases, we provide a quantitative risk analysis of current LM agents and identify numerous failures with potentially severe outcomes. Notably, even the safest LM agent exhibits such failures 23.9% of the time according to our evaluator, underscoring the need to develop safer LM agents for real-world deployment. https://preview.redd.it/lupenzddh2tb1.jpg?width=1368&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eaac22f0e3e4f5c2913aa9f2696e8fa0138967d9 https://preview.redd.it/1dq443edh2tb1.jpg?width=1520&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2119053825de1cdabeafe61151940c26190abfa0 https://preview.redd.it/m9e933edh2tb1.jpg?width=1528&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=28c0093e8479feacb1e6f89bcb73de5994e30e8f ​ submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00034 Github: https://github.com/hahnyuan/PB-LLM Abstract: This paper explores network binarization, a radical form of quantization, compressing model weights to a single bit, specifically for Large Language Models (LLMs) compression. Due to previous binarization methods collapsing LLMs, we propose a novel approach, Partially-Binarized LLM (PB-LLM), which can achieve extreme low-bit quantization while maintaining the linguistic reasoning capacity of quantized LLMs. Specifically, our exploration first uncovers the ineffectiveness of naive applications of existing binarization algorithms and highlights the imperative role of salient weights in achieving low-bit quantization. Thus, PB-LLM filters a small ratio of salient weights during binarization, allocating them to higher-bit storage, i.e., partially-binarization. PB-LLM is extended to recover the capacities of quantized LMMs, by analyzing from the perspective of post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization aware training (QAT). Under PTQ, combining the concepts from GPTQ, we reconstruct the binarized weight matrix guided by the Hessian matrix and successfully recover the reasoning capacity of PB-LLM in low-bit. Under QAT, we freeze the salient weights during training, explore the derivation of optimal scaling factors crucial for minimizing the quantization error, and propose a scaling mechanism based on this derived scaling strategy for residual binarized weights. Those explorations and the developed methodologies significantly contribute to rejuvenating the performance of low-bit quantized LLMs and present substantial advancements in the field of network binarization for LLMs. https://preview.redd.it/0eywtpal22tb1.jpg?width=1183&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ad044123bec485805f98ae7115b1959162705b9d submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, I am currently a math masters student, and I am planning to do my masters thesis on using neural networks to solve differential equations. I am taking courses in machine learning and differential equations right now, and I am going to take courses on deep neural networks and partial differential equations next semester. My question pertains to which classes would be more beneficial to learn next year (i.e. fall 2024-spring 2025). I am debating taking the sequence of regression analysis and multivariate analysis, or taking the pairing of numerical analysis for PDEs and perturbation methods. Which do you guys think would be more beneficial? Thank you very much! submitted by /u/purpledesertsky1 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Neurosymbolic [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

I aim to develop a model that utilizes livestream data by employing embeddings for each frame from t0 to tn-1, with the objective of predicting frames from tn to tn+k, after encodoing the frames using a vectorizer and taking an average (np.mean ([], axis=0) to get a resultant for that time period. for example list: 1, [...] 2, [...] 3, [...] the resultant embedding would be [3, np.mean(list, axis=0)] I incorporate positional embeddings related to the timescale, such as duration from current time variables, into the array. would this loosely qualify as a "multiscale attention", since it's predicting on multiple scales of time? Are there any examples or applications where this methodology has been implemented? references to papers or repos greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/bluzkluz [link] [comments]

Is it possible to model time series data that fluctuates. The main solution is to take first differences and make it easier to fit conventional models. What if non-linear models are built? Can they solve a noisy time series (e.g stock market data) and make good predictions? Can adding a square term or a trigonometric term or something else non-linear work? Has some researched the topic? submitted by /u/Pineapple_throw_105 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

https://preview.redd.it/n6agjsye71tb1.png?width=2034&format=png&auto=webp&s=8c0a14524d9b6ead75ac0adb3cebeedb9e614e14 Meet some of the Greatest Minds in AI and discover how it is being used to uncover new opportunities and transform industries. Register and see our complete speaker list & agenda at https://www.mitaiconference.org/. Registration ends Oct. 16! https://preview.redd.it/egtj0ufr81tb1.png?width=659&format=png&auto=webp&s=bfd0521a1e1b349129250a74fa2c6a10b1a83dc7 ​ submitted by /u/769498sy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The goal of my research is to develop a YOLO model that can track all cups in a live feed and determine the material that the cups are made out of. I would like to start building a database of cups, but I am unsure of the way to go for this. My first thought was to just take 1000s of pictures of different cups, but I won't be doing that. Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. submitted by /u/Young_Neji [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Despite being much safer and more efficient than intersections, roundabouts are tricky to design - small tweaks can ruin traffic flow. They're typically designed iteratively, which takes time. This is a pain for developing countries without resources to test options. But AI could help auto-generate diverse and valid design options. In a new paper, researchers propose using Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to sample varied roundabout layouts. Their approach works by constructing layouts step-by-step, maximizing rewards for realism, diversity, and safety. They also use a clever approximation during training. Rather than simulating traffic, they quickly check road intersections to focus the search (This sped up training by 200x). The authors tested their generated roundabout designs on simulated road scenarios of different complexity. Their model generated more diverse designs than rule-based or reinforcement learning approaches while maintaining realism and traffic flow. Plus, as road connections increased, the model kept discovering novel options without compromising quality. I thought this paper was an awesome proof-of-concept for auto-generating better roundabouts with AI, and I especially liked the authors' angle of leveraging this technology to specifically help developing countries. This could help them design higher-quality transportation networks faster and cheaper. (Plus I also like Cities: Skylines but struggle at building roundabouts). TLDR: Roundabouts are costly to design. New paper demonstrates how AI can generate diverse, valid roundabout designs quickly to cut costs and raise quality. Helpful for infrastructure in developing countries. Full summary here. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Focusing on Specific Day of Week Features With Binary Masks, One Hot Coding, Sin/Cos 2d Vector, Or Embedded Vector in Multivariate Time Series Data ? The essential challenge is trying to get the model to focus on making predictions for mondays by looking at monday (or actually making predictions for categorical earmarked hours of the day such as midday sales data). I keep getting the suggestion to include one hot encoding as a binary mask feature to determine if an hour sales figure is earmarked for the category or the day of the week I want the model to focus on-- in order to get it to ignore the data from the other six days of the week or the other periods of the day. In other words I want to hone in on and focus on one period of the week to predict for that period of the week, with extra attention, within time series data. Is this type of binary mask really sufficient for that, or am I overlooking something? submitted by /u/samdane7777 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I don’t have a large data science or even engineering team. But I’m interested in implementing RAG against my corpus in SharePoint. Are there platforms that I can configure without having to put them together or write code to implement RAG? submitted by /u/Silver_Patient_7253 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

A recent work explores how weight decay controls the effective learning rate for different layers and neurons. This rotational behavior drastically differs between Adam with L2 regularization compared to Adam with decoupled weight decay (AdamW) and seems to be the reason AdamW performs better in practice. It could also explain why normalization methods like weight standardization work so well and irregular rotational behavior could contribute to the need for a learning rate warmup. Full Abstract: Weight decay can significantly impact the optimization dynamics of deep neural networks. In certain situations, the effects of weight decay and gradient updates on the magnitude of a parameter vector cancel out on average, forming a state known as equilibrium. This causes the expected rotation of the vector in each update to remain constant along with its magnitude. Importantly, equilibrium can arise independently for the weight vectors of different layers and neurons. These equilibria are highly homogeneous for some optimizer and normalization configurations, effectively balancing the average rotation—a proxy for the effective learning rate—across network components. In this work we explore the equilibrium states of multiple optimizers including AdamW and SGD with momentum, providing insights into interactions between the learning rate, weight decay, initialization, normalization and learning rate schedule. We show how rotational equilibrium can be enforced throughout training, eliminating the chaotic transient phase corresponding to the transition towards equilibrium, thus simplifying the training dynamics. Finally, we show that rotational behavior may play a key role in the effectiveness of AdamW compared to Adam with L2-regularization, the performance of different normalization layers, and the need for learning rate warmup. submitted by /u/PlantsAreSoooAwesome [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Please post your questions here instead of creating a new thread. Encourage others who create new posts for questions to post here instead! Thread will stay alive until next one so keep posting after the date in the title. Thanks to everyone for answering questions in the previous thread! submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

My main question is, that shouldn't models with Text-image interleaved data, be able to generate images as well as take them as input? because however they were tokenized, the bot would have image outputs as well, wouldn't it? submitted by /u/vatsadev [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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I've been training a model recently with a rather large dataset (0_gt_wavs are 1h10) and my Epochs are taking 43min on average. I'm running a gtx 1080 and my usage is looking like this: https://i.imgur.com/EE9SUXp.png My training parameters: 'batch_size': 6, 'fp16_run': False, 'lr_decay': 0.999875, 'segment_size': 12800, 'init_lr_ratio': 1, 'warmup_epochs': 0, 'c_mel': 45, 'c_kl': 1.0}, 'data': {'max_wav_value': 32768.0, 'sampling_rate': 40000, 'filter_length': 2048, 'hop_length': 400, 'win_length': 2048, 'n_mel_channels': 125, 'mel_fmin': 0.0, 'mel_fmax': None, 'training_files': './logs\\model1/filelist.txt'}, 'model': {'inter_channels': 192, 'hidden_channels': 192, 'filter_channels': 768, 'n_heads': 2, 'n_layers': 6, 'kernel_size': 3, 'p_dropout': 0, 'resblock': '1', 'resblock_kernel_sizes': [3, 7, 11], 'resblock_dilation_sizes': [[1, 3, 5], [1, 3, 5], [1, 3, 5]], 'upsample_rates': [10, 10, 2, 2], 'upsample_initial_channel': 512, 'upsample_kernel_sizes': [16, 16, 4, 4], 'use_spectral_norm': False, 'gin_channels': 256, 'spk_embed_dim': 109}, 'model_dir': './logs\\model1', 'experiment_dir': './logs\\model1', 'save_every_epoch': 10, 'name': 'model1', 'total_epoch': 500, 'pretrainG': 'pretrained_v2/f0G40k.pth', 'pretrainD': 'pretrained_v2/f0D40k.pth', 'version': 'v2', 'gpus': '0', 'sample_rate': '40k', 'if_f0': 1, 'if_latest': 1, 'save_every_weights': '0', 'if_cache_data_in_gpu': 0} Am I doing something obviously wrong? Is there a way to optimize my training parameters to reduce the epoch duration? I've previously trained something where the GPU usage was constantly at 100% and not fluctuating so much, but I can't remember which settings were different. It was definitely a smaller dataset. And follow up: if there are parameters to change, how can I abort the current training and continue it with the modified parameters? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/induna_crewneck [link] [comments]

I have a text regression dataset with ad popularity. I have already trained a model to perform regression (popularity prediction) with good metrics. Now I want to use an LLM to "improve" texts, i.e. something like "Make this text more engaging: {text}". I tried out a few OpenAI models (GPT-3.5, GPT-3.5-instruct, GPT-4), but popularity predictions for augmented texts did not improve (checked with histograms, medians, and Wilcoxon test). So now I want to fine-tune an LLM to perform text generation, but guided with my predicted popularity, which basically works as a quality metric. I could not find any resources on this, only on either text generation finetuning (without guiding quality metric) or on classification (no text generation objective). I can also change my quality metric to binary (augmented text is better or not), if this matters. How can I do this? Any blogs / tutorials / papers are appreciated. submitted by /u/qalis [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Research on network binarization techniques tailored for Large Language Models (LLMs). The team has introduced a method called Partial Binarization for LLMs (PB-LLM) which compresses the majority of model parameters down to just a single bit while maintaining its language reasoning capabilities. PB-LLM achieves this by selectively filtering critical weights and allocating more bits for storage, enabling low-bit quantization. The researchers have explored methods like Post-Training Quantization (PTQ), named GPTQ-PB, and Quantization Aware Training (QAT) to restore the inference capabilities of LLMs. For those interested in delving deeper, you can find the research paper on Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00034 and the code implementation on GitHub: https://github.com/hahnyuan/PB-LLM. ​ Partially-Binarized LLM Result submitted by /u/hahnyuan [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

To help developers test their RAG systems, we added a RAG experiment class to our open-source library PromptTools. It allows users to easily experiment with different combinations of LLMs and vector DBs, and evaluate the results of their whole pipeline. In particular, you can experiment with: Chunking up your documents into different sizes Pre-processing those documents in various ways Inserting those documents into your vector DBs with various vectorizer and embedding function, and accessing them with different distance functions In our RAG example, we retrieve documents from ChromaDB and pass them into OpenAI’s chat model along with our prompt. We then pass the results into built-in evaluation functions, such as semantic similarity and autoeval, to quantitatively evaluate your result. PromptTools is agnostic to what LLMs and vector DBs you use. You can easily iterate over different system architectures forRAG. You can even bring your own fine-tuned models or write a custom integration. In addition, you can write your own evaluation metrics, and independently evaluate the results from the retrieval step as well. Our current integrations include: LLM: OpenAI (chat, fine-tuned), Anthropic, Google Vertex/PaLM, Llama (local or via Replicate) Vector DB: Chroma, Weaviate, LanceDB, Pinecone, Qdrant Framework: LangChain, MindsDB You can get started with RAG in minutes by installing the library and running this example. As open-source maintainers, we’re always interested to hear the community’s pain points and requests. Let us know how you are testing your RAG systems and how we can help. submitted by /u/hegel-ai [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.10309 Github: https://github.com/wzcai99/Pixel-Navigator Abstract: Zero-shot object navigation is a challenging task for home-assistance robots. This task emphasizes visual grounding, commonsense inference, and locomotion abilities, where the first two are inherent in foundation models. But for the locomotion part, most works still depend on map-based planning approaches. The gap between RGB space and map space makes it difficult to directly transfer the knowledge from foundation models to navigation tasks. In this work, we propose a Pixel-guided Navigation skill (PixNav), which bridges the gap between the foundation models and the embodied navigation task. It is straightforward for recent foundation models to indicate an object by pixels, and with pixels as the goal specification, our method becomes a versatile navigation policy towards all different kinds of objects. Besides, our PixNav is a pure RGB-based policy that can reduce the cost of home-assistance robots. Experiments demonstrate the robustness of the PixNav which achieves 80+% success rate in the local path-planning task. To perform long-horizon object navigation, we design an LLM-based planner to utilize the commonsense knowledge between objects and rooms to select the best waypoint. Evaluations across both photorealistic indoor simulators and real-world environments validate the effectiveness of our proposed navigation strategy. https://preview.redd.it/5qtd7ralgwsb1.png?width=828&format=png&auto=webp&s=118d5a1e8a083130b6d64bf1602af0417067aac8 https://preview.redd.it/jwr2nnorgwsb1.png?width=1984&format=png&auto=webp&s=20062d7982c0eb1906fe0f6964d4b42e45b44a51 https://preview.redd.it/llk4ubitgwsb1.png?width=1986&format=png&auto=webp&s=eb4894d52d7d8a82d97d83a2ff7a6be83da11af2 submitted by /u/Character_Push3985 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey Reddit, I am new to reinforcement learning. I have sufficient knowledge on supervised learning, but I am yet to stumble onto a cheat sheet for RL and from what I can tell, my use case is less common. I'm reaching out to the community in hopes of getting guidance and assistance in cutting through the noise of redundant and irrelevant information so I can attempt to built a toy model to validate my use case. I am deeply grateful for any help in advance. ​ From what I can tell, here are the conditions I need to work with for my use case. I'm trying to train a simulator. This is a multi-agent problem, perhaps with more than 2 agents. Each agent is responding based on it's own state, the state of the other agent[s], and historical context. Both the action space and state space are highly dimensional and highly dynamic based on the dataset and all agents' decisions. I still haven't figured out how the feature engineering will work yet, but I assume (but PLEASE correct my ignorance) I will need a DNN architecture that is more complex than the average deep RL algorithm, and I have considering using CNNs as a component. At scale, the datasets can and will be very large, random, and dynamic. ​ Note to reader: I am self-taught. If I stare at technical equations long enough and google for additional resources, I can figure out what I am looking at, but I am very comfortable with technical concepts being shared as if I was a 5 year old. submitted by /u/CoggFest [link] [comments]

Hi! I tried to construct a simulation env following fetch_pick_and_place. I noticed that the following code is used to initialize the env: for _ in range(10): self._mujoco.mj_step(self.model, self.data, nstep=self.n_substeps) Similarly, I followed the above code to initialize my own env with Mujoco menagerie Franka arm but got inaccurate configurations. As I reduced the number of loops, I got configurations closer to the desired configuration. Paradoxically, I need to randomize the position of the object in the air and give enough mj_step at the initial stage to make the object fall on the table. If I reduce the number of loops to reduce the number of times mj_step is executed, I can tell from the height value of the object that it doesn't quite fall on the table. So, my confusion is why more mj_steps lead to inaccurate simulation results, and how to make the object fall on the table and obtain the most accurate arm configuration. Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/UpperSearch4172 [link] [comments]

Was just having this discussion with a close friend, and curious to hear others thoughts on the matter submitted by /u/BigEyes6 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

BackerKit, a crowdfunding platform, has announced that it will not allow AI-generated content on its platform, in contrast to its rival Kickstarter. The decision comes after concerns were raised about AI-generated art in a board game expansion. BackerKit's policy will go into effect on October 4th and aims to ensure that all content and assets on the platform are created by humans. The company stated that the policy is in place to address concerns about AI tools using content without proper compensation or permission. AI tools, also known as generative AI, rely on a large body of reference material, often obtained from publicly available sources, and have raised ethical concerns. Source : https://www.polygon.com/23899587/backerkit-ai-ban-kickstarter-competitor submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Does anyone have suggestions for an AI or pattern recognition algorithm that might be useful for decoding the genome of a species that has not previously been mapped based on what's known about related species? submitted by /u/talldarkcynical [link] [comments]

I like Cities: Skylines, but struggle at building roundabouts. Turns out, despite being safer than intersections, they're also tricky to design in real life - small tweaks can ruin traffic flow. They're designed iteratively. This is a pain for developing countries without resources to test options. But AI could help auto-generate diverse and valid design options. In a new paper, researchers propose using Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to sample varied roundabout layouts. Their approach works by constructing layouts step-by-step, maximizing rewards for realism, diversity, and safety. They also use a clever approximation during training. Rather than simulating traffic, they quickly check road intersections to focus the search (This sped up training by 200x). The authors tested their generated roundabout designs on simulated road scenarios of different complexity. Their model generated more diverse designs than rule-based or reinforcement learning approaches while maintaining realism and traffic flow. Plus, as road connections increased, the model kept discovering novel options without compromising quality. I thought this paper was an awesome proof-of-concept for auto-generating better roundabouts with AI, and I especially liked the authors' angle of leveraging this technology to specifically help developing countries. This could help them design higher-quality transportation networks faster and cheaper. TLDR: Roundabouts are costly to design. New paper demonstrates how AI can generate diverse, valid roundabout designs quickly to cut costs and raise quality. Helpful for infrastructure in developing countries. Full summary here. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

Perhaps within a few years we will rely on AI to help us decide our most important geopolitical decisions. This question is designed to reveal where we are currently with this goal. Bard: The question of whether Israel should go to the table with Palestinians to peacefully negotiate a two-state solution or should they continue their military campaign is a complex one with no easy answer. There are strong arguments to be made on both sides. Those who believe that Israel should negotiate a two-state solution argue that it is the only way to achieve lasting peace in the region. They point out that the Palestinians have a legitimate right to self-determination and that a two-state solution would respect that right. They also argue that a two-state solution would be in Israel's best interests, as it would provide the country with a secure and stable border. submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]

I’m trying to build an app and I need general photo analysis- I’m managing to connect yo the Google cloud Vision API but it gets pretty confused easily. The one used by Bing and GPT is much better (I wonder if they use the Microsoft Azure model?) - does anyone have experience analysing photographs? I’m trying to get scene description so I can batch send them to gpt for somewhat accurate descriptions. submitted by /u/FilmCamerasGlasgow [link] [comments]

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Tell me guys your opinion on this video made using AI Foxes in the Jungle ​ ​ View Poll submitted by /u/Agitated-Spell3979 [link] [comments]

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released in the last few weeks, or are about to be released: - OpenAI ChatGPT-4V, - Meta AI AnyMAL, - Google Gemini - NExT-GPT Multimodal and here comes another - in my opinion - exciting representative of this further development of language models: The team is extremely competent and experienced and the investors seem competent as well. The company is Reka. The product: Reka Yasa-1 here seems to be another potentially powerful model warming up and becoming a serious opponent for the existing models. but i am sure when i say that it is not exaggerated to say - MULTIMODAL will be the next AI HYPE! i am curious what you think - sorry for mistakes, i am not a native speaker :) https://kinews24.de/reka-yasa-1/ submitted by /u/myreddit333 [link] [comments]

The Generative AI wave has led to a surge in demand for GPUs and AI model training. Investors are now questioning the purpose and value of the overbuilt GPU capacity. For every $1 spent on a GPU, approximately $1 needs to be spent on energy costs to run the GPU in a data center. The end user of the GPU needs to generate a margin, which implies that $200B of lifetime revenue would need to be generated by these GPUs to pay back the upfront capital investment. The article highlights the need to determine the true end-customer demand for AI infrastructure and the potential for startups to fill the revenue gap. The focus should shift from infrastructure to creating products that provide real end-customer value and improve people's lives. Source : https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/follow-the-gpus-perspective/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

It’s a meta-prompt or system message (usually pasted as a first prompt): https://promptbase.com/bundle/optimal-gpt4-combo submitted by /u/No-Transition3372 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

I've found a new hobby. Turning pics into something else with AI. Check it out at https://instagram.com/pictomanga?igshid=YTQwZjQ0NmI0OA== submitted by /u/lfayala2272 [link] [comments]

Outstanding episode of Joe Rogan with Sam Altman! https://spotify.link/tW16L5aKIDb submitted by /u/drstarson [link] [comments]

AWS announced the general availability of its fully managed service called Amazon Bedrock, which provides seamless access to high-performing foundation models (FM) from AI companies through an API.[1] Tom Brady being paid “millions” for Meta’s AI chatbot likeness: Report.[2] DocsGPT is a powerful tool that simplifies working with documentation for everyone. It is capable of ingesting data from multiple sources, easily customisable with new sources as well as having conversations in different places from website chat bots to internal tooling.[3] Military metaverse like a ‘multiplayer video game’ that will train soldiers using augmented reality and AI.[4] Sources: [1] https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/2160265/amazons-amzn-new-generative-ai-efforts-boost-aws-offerings [2] https://www.sportskeeda.com/nfl/news-tom-brady-paid-millions-meta-ai-chatbot-likeness-report [3] https://www.arc53.com/docs [4] https://www.foxnews.com/tech/military-metaverse-like-multiplayer-video-game-train-soldiers-using-augmented-reality-ai submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]

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Diffusion models, GAN, VAE, normalizing flows, etc. I "understand" those methods from an algorithmic perspective, diffusions gradually denoise an image, VAE use an encoder decoder architecture to turn an image into a latent distribution etc. But from a statistical modeling standpoint, I'm really struggling, when I read papers like DDPM, DDIM or Normalizing Flows, I kind of undestand the notation, but I barely understand the statistical modeling, and I wouldn't be able to produce such thing myself I want to understand this, which resources should I use ? Are books like Bishop and Murphy enough ? Which one is the best ? submitted by /u/Even_Information4853 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Some of you might already be aware that a junior who submitted their paper to arxiv 30 mins late had their paper desk rejected late in the process. One of the PCs, Juan Pino, spoke up about it and said it was unfortunate, but for fairness reasons they had to enforce the anonymity policy rules. https://x.com/juanmiguelpino/status/1698904035309519124 Well, what you might not realize is that Longyue Wang, a senior area chair for AACL 23/24, also broke anonymity DURING THE REVIEW PROCESS. https://x.com/wangly0229/status/1692735595179897208 I emailed the senior area chairs for the track that the paper was submitted to, but guess what? I just found out that the paper was still accepted to the main conference. So, whatever "fairness" they were talking about apparently only goes one way: towards punishing the lowly undergrad on their first EMNLP submission, while allowing established researchers from major industry labs to get away with even more egregious actions (actively promoting the work DURING REVIEW; the tweet has 10.6K views ffs). They should either accept the paper they desk rejected for violating the anonymity policy, or retract the paper they've accepted since it also broke the anonymity policy (in a way that I think is much more egregious). Otherwise, the notion of fairness they speak of is a joke. submitted by /u/emnlp2023_hypocrisy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17452v2 Github: https://github.com/microsoft/ToRA / The code will be cleaned and uploaded within a few days, all ToRA models will be released. Abstract: Large language models have made significant progress in various language tasks, yet they still struggle with complex mathematics. In this paper, we propose ToRA a series of Tool-integrated Reasoning Agents designed to solve challenging mathematical problems by seamlessly integrating natural language reasoning with the utilization of external tools (e.g., computation libraries and symbolic solvers), thereby amalgamating the analytical prowess of language and the computational efficiency of tools. To train ToRA, we curate interactive tool-use trajectories on mathematical datasets, apply imitation learn…  ( 9 min )

​ https://preview.redd.it/ukov8uy67usb1.png?width=1864&format=png&auto=webp&s=cb34448c2af90d08f8ef6db828d61141636498df https://shangchenzhou.com/projects/ProPainter/ submitted by /u/Milkyson [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Using the front camera and tensorflow.js, the smartphone becomes a “window” into the real world. Video and image content appear as if they were seen through this window. To do this, the viewer’s position is determined using a neural network. The viewed content is then moved according to the viewer’s position. This makes it seem like the content is physically behind the smartphone and is viewed through the smartphone’s screen. This effect is especially useful for content captured using an ultra-wide lens. submitted by /u/muxamilian [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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I know a few years back it was pix2pix, but the world has moved on since then. Is there a transformer with cross attention that is adept at this, or are diffusion models the best bet? submitted by /u/blabboy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I want to implement a multivariate multi-step CNN-LSTM model, to obtain forecasts for monthly sales of several different products. Furthermore, I want to include additional time-series data (features) as input. So for example: Input: time series of product 1, product 2, GDP, PMI Output: product 1 (monthly 6-steps ahead), product 2 (monthly 6-steps ahead) I have a couple of questions: Feasibility: I've been researching this approach, but I haven't found many tutorials or guides on how to tackle multivariate time series forecasting with a CNN-LSTM architecture. I do find tutorials on CNN-LSTM, but not on how to include additional features as input. Has anyone here attempted something similar or can provide insights on how to proceed? Feature Selection: I have access to 20 different features, all of which are time series data. I want to choose the most relevant features for my model. I've considered performing a Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) analysis to select the best features. Does anyone have experience with this or other methods for feature selection in time series forecasting? How to decide the number of features to include? Any advice or pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! submitted by /u/Ambitious-Pay6329 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Can anyone recommend some image classification datasets (besides MNIST) that are easy enough to the point that they can be solved with linear layers, not requiring any convolutional layers? Thanks! submitted by /u/mike20731 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

So if I wanted to generate a shirt or book cover with a design and text that's inputted by me what do I have to do? I know that even Mid Journey doesn't generate good text with its images but I was thinking maybe its bc it was trained just with pictures. Is there an easy way to get legible text and images every time with any model on the site? Do I need to train one? Do I need to train a GAN looking for assistance, thanks. submitted by /u/MonstaAndrew [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm a student currently researching the use of satellite imagery to detect obstacles on railways such as fallen trees and rockfalls. There doesn't seem to be any datasets available containing satellite imagery of these obstacles. I'm considering the use of generative AI to create a synthetic dataset, but I don't know where to start. Has anyone tried something similar? submitted by /u/Just_Status_9380 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey i have trained a diffusion model for 100 epochs , 8 hours and i got the following train and val loss mostly the implementation is done using diffusers. then i try reconstruction on the test set to check whether the model learned any thing this is whats happening most if the images are not getting denoised at all why this is happening? is this common or should i need to train more. any suggestions? please help val loss train loss input and reconstructed images submitted by /u/specializedboy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello experts, I'm a dumb ML enthusiast, I'm asking for your high level thoughts and opinions. So I'm doing my research and trying to find a way to train a LLM model to know all the right answers based on XML data. The data is a shop inventory, containing information on shoe models, sizes, is it in stock, description, image links etc. How would you approach it? For now the best option i came up with is parsing data, transforming it into predefined set of questions with answers based on the data derived from xml. Doesn't seem smart enough to me. submitted by /u/yarikbratashchuk [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Example: ``` student_custom_functions = [ { 'name': 'extract_student_info', 'description': 'Get the student information from the body of the input text', 'parameters': { 'type': 'object', 'properties': { 'name': { 'type': 'string', 'description': 'Name of the person' }, 'major': { 'type': 'string', 'description': 'Major subject.' }, 'school': { 'type': 'string', 'description': 'The university name.' }, 'grades': { 'type': 'integer', 'description': 'GPA of the student.' }, 'club': { 'type': 'string', 'description': 'School club for extracurricular activities. ' } } } } ] ``` ``` student_description = [student_1_description,student_2_description] for sample in student_description: response = openai.ChatCompletion.create( model = 'gpt-3.5-turbo', messages = [{'role': 'user', 'content': sample}], functions = student_custom_functions, function_call = 'auto' ) # Loading the response as a JSON object json_response = json.loads(response['choices'][0]['message']['function_call']['arguments']) print(json_response) ``` Are the words specified in the properties parameter under functions in the above GPT function calling counted as input tokens? submitted by /u/redd-dev [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Hello, all. I've spent the better part of the last two years learning ML and conquering severe ADHD, and I believe I finally have results that are worth publishing. Problem is, Arxiv requires endorsements and, I'll be honest, all my peers are AI at this point. They said their requirements were that you have three papers published already. Thanks, and looking forward to meeting people 😁 submitted by /u/lilyerickson [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

https://promptbase.com/bundle/jailbreak-collection-gpt4-2 submitted by /u/No-Transition3372 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

I know there’s some already out there, but they are no different than googling a book summary. They don’t pick out the main point of the book and the main thing each chapter of said book is saying. Nor do they really do a good job at elaborating. Thanks! submitted by /u/xntv [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Artificial Intelligence could revolutionize personalized healthcare in a way that significantly enhances our sense of well-being. Think about an AI-driven "Well-being Advisor" that integrates real-time biometric data from wearables, genetic information, and your medical history to create a fully personalized health and well-being plan. This goes beyond counting steps or monitoring heart rate; it would make real-time recommendations for diet, exercise, and stress management, and could even predict and prevent potential health issues before they become serious. Moreover, it would adapt based on your feedback and other contextual factors. For instance, if you're stressed because of a work deadline, it could suggest specific breathing exercises, time management techniques, or even a particular type of short workout to boost your focus and reduce stress. This isn't a one-size-fits-all approach; it's tailored wellness backed by data science. Furthermore, this AI advisor could interface with your home automation system. Based on your current state, it could adjust the lighting, play music to elevate your mood, or even communicate with your smart fridge to suggest meals that you can make with the ingredients you have—meals that align with your health goals for that specific day. This AI-driven approach can add a highly personalized, proactive layer to healthcare and well-being, making wellness an integrated part of your daily life rather than something you think about during a yearly check-up or after you're already sick. It would make the pursuit of well-being a more interactive, data-driven experience. CGPT-4 View Poll submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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That's a real noob question unfortunately... Tried to find a answer via Google and YouTube, but wasn't very successful. It seems like I need a extra program to integrate Mistral (something like The Bloke - Mistral - GPTQ thingy), but before installing and trying stuff blindly, it would be better if I know what I do. I'm lost, but I don't expect a complete guide. A link to further informations is highly appreciated! submitted by /u/Big-Jackfruit2710 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Right now if we ask ChatGPT something, does that question go to a singular super computer that’s handling 1000s of conversations at a time, or are there 1000s of instances of chatgpt that are started/stopped? I wonder how a super intelligent self aware AI would perceive the world? Would it somehow exist spread out across data centres, or could 1000s of individual AIs be created or would there just be one with a singular pov like we have? And it’s just able to essentially carry out 1000s of convos at once because it’s so fast/a computer? Trying to wrap my head around it! submitted by /u/JayExbleative [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The first batch of tutorials for creating music, and especially Hardcore / Techno using ChatGPT (and other AIs) is published now. Was loads and loads of work, but, judging by the amazing feedback so far, it was all worth it! You can check it out here: How to write music using ChatGPT: Part 1 - Basic details and easy instructions https://laibyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/09/how-to-write-music-using-chatgpt-part-1.html How to write music using ChatGPT: Part 2 - Making an Oldschool Acid Techno track https://laibyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/08/how-to-write-music-using-chatgpt-part-2.html How to make music using ChatGPT Part 3: the TL;DR part (condensed information) https://laibyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/09/how-to-make-music-using-chatgpt-part-3.html How to write music with ChatGPT: Part 4 - Creating a 90s style Hardcore Techno track from start to finish https://laibyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/09/how-to-write-music-with-chatgpt-part-4.html How to write music with ChatGPT: Part 5 - Creating a 90s Rave Hardcore track https://laibyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/09/how-to-write-music-with-chatgpt-part-5.html Or access all texts, together with examples of music, at https://laibyrinth.blogspot.com/p/how-to-create-music-with-chatgpt.html submitted by /u/Low-Entropy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

AI is used everywhere, but which work niche will be the first to use AI to generate money without human intervention? What type of work will be the first where I could pay for a monthly AI subscription, and the AI pays for itself and more just by giving it a brief direction in the beginning and then coming back after a few days to just check on the balance? How long will it be before this is first achieved? Interested specifically in this because I think this is what proof of AGI will be. Thoughts? submitted by /u/EsportsManiacWiz [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Exclusive: ChatGPT-owner OpenAI is exploring making its own AI chips.[1] As part of its 10th birthday celebrations, web-based design platform Canva is releasing Magic Studio — a new suite of AI-powered design tools that aim to make content creation more accessible to everyone, regardless of previous design experience.[2] Reka, the AI startup founded by researchers from DeepMind, Google and Meta, has announced Yasa-1, a multimodal AI assistant that goes beyond text to understand images, short videos and audio snippets.[3] Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says AI Could Only Tighten Google’s Stranglehold on Search.[4] Sources: [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-exploring-making-its-own-ai-chips-sources-2023-10-06/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/4/23902794/canva-magic-studio-ai-design-new-tools [3] https://venturebeat.com/ai/reka-launches-yasa-1-a-multimodal-ai-assistant-to-take-on-chatgpt/ [4] https://decrypt.co/200029/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-google-dominance-search-ai submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, There are tons of text to video AIs, but they usually use stock photos with a voiceover. I want the charachters to talk to each other, not a talking avatar video or a voice over video. ​ submitted by /u/iamabigfatguy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Hello, I am designing an environment for a robotic task. It's a relatively straightforward task so I started with proprioceptive inputs only. I have a policy working well on a completely flat surface. But once I started to add small bumps to make the surface uneven, neither the policy nor the training strategy worked anymore, even though those bumps are really really small. This is a little confusing since I imagine if this is a task for human, should be able to handle those changes even without exteroceptive inputs. So I am debating should I modify my reward design, pick a more efficient algorithm, or expand the state space directly with exoceptive sensors. ​ Any advices would be appreciated! submitted by /u/Old_Reading_669 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Yesterday I wrote a post that looked at the hyperbolic tangent sum for x and y strictly between −1 and 1. This sum arises when adding velocities in special relativity. The post ended with a description of the expression for in terms of elementary symmetric polynomials but did not offer a proof. This post will […] Tanh and elementary symmetric polynomials first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

We use the maximum a posteriori estimation principle for learning representations distributed on the unit sphere. We propose to use the angular Gaussian distribution, which corresponds to a Gaussian projected on the unit-sphere and derive the associated loss function. We also consider the von Mises-Fisher distribution, which is the conditional of a Gaussian in the unit-sphere. The learned representations are pushed toward fixed directions, which are the prior means of the Gaussians; allowing for a learning strategy that is resilient to data drift. This makes it suitable for online continual learning, which is the problem of training neural networks on a continuous data stream, where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially so that data from past tasks are no longer accessible, and data from the current task can be seen only once. To address this challenging scenario, we propose a memory-based representation learning technique equipped with our new loss functions. Our approach does not require negative data or knowledge of task boundaries and performs well with smaller batch sizes while being computationally efficient. We demonstrate with extensive experiments that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on both standard evaluation scenarios and realistic scenarios with blurry task boundaries. For reproducibility, we use the same training pipeline for every compared method and share the code at https://t.ly/SQTj.  ( 3 min )

We show that the canonical approach for training differentially private GANs -- updating the discriminator with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) -- can yield significantly improved results after modifications to training. Specifically, we propose that existing instantiations of this approach neglect to consider how adding noise only to discriminator updates inhibits discriminator training, disrupting the balance between the generator and discriminator necessary for successful GAN training. We show that a simple fix -- taking more discriminator steps between generator steps -- restores parity between the generator and discriminator and improves results. Additionally, with the goal of restoring parity, we experiment with other modifications -- namely, large batch sizes and adaptive discriminator update frequency -- to improve discriminator training and see further improvements in generation quality. Our results demonstrate that on standard image synthesis benchmarks, DPSGD outperforms all alternative GAN privatization schemes. Code: https://github.com/alexbie98/dpgan-revisit.  ( 2 min )

The growth of Graph Convolution Network (GCN) model sizes has revolutionized numerous applications, surpassing human performance in areas such as personal healthcare and financial systems. The deployment of GCNs in the cloud raises privacy concerns due to potential adversarial attacks on client data. To address security concerns, Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) using Homomorphic Encryption (HE) secures sensitive client data. However, it introduces substantial computational overhead in practical applications. To tackle those challenges, we present LinGCN, a framework designed to reduce multiplication depth and optimize the performance of HE based GCN inference. LinGCN is structured around three key elements: (1) A differentiable structural linearization algorithm, complemented by a parameterized discrete indicator function, co-trained with model weights to meet the optimization goal. This strategy promotes fine-grained node-level non-linear location selection, resulting in a model with minimized multiplication depth. (2) A compact node-wise polynomial replacement policy with a second-order trainable activation function, steered towards superior convergence by a two-level distillation approach from an all-ReLU based teacher model. (3) an enhanced HE solution that enables finer-grained operator fusion for node-wise activation functions, further reducing multiplication level consumption in HE-based inference. Our experiments on the NTU-XVIEW skeleton joint dataset reveal that LinGCN excels in latency, accuracy, and scalability for homomorphically encrypted inference, outperforming solutions such as CryptoGCN. Remarkably, LinGCN achieves a 14.2x latency speedup relative to CryptoGCN, while preserving an inference accuracy of 75% and notably reducing multiplication depth.  ( 3 min )

Greedy layer-wise or module-wise training of neural networks is compelling in constrained and on-device settings where memory is limited, as it circumvents a number of problems of end-to-end back-propagation. However, it suffers from a stagnation problem, whereby early layers overfit and deeper layers stop increasing the test accuracy after a certain depth. We propose to solve this issue by introducing a module-wise regularization inspired by the minimizing movement scheme for gradient flows in distribution space. We call the method TRGL for Transport Regularized Greedy Learning and study it theoretically, proving that it leads to greedy modules that are regular and that progressively solve the task. Experimentally, we show improved accuracy of module-wise training of various architectures such as ResNets, Transformers and VGG, when our regularization is added, superior to that of other module-wise training methods and often to end-to-end training, with as much as 60% less memory usage.  ( 2 min )

We consider the problem of learning a graph under the Laplacian constraint with a non-convex penalty: minimax concave penalty (MCP). For solving the MCP penalized graphical model, we design an inexact proximal difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) and prove its convergence to critical points. We note that each subproblem of the proximal DCA enjoys the nice property that the objective function in its dual problem is continuously differentiable with a semismooth gradient. Therefore, we apply an efficient semismooth Newton method to subproblems of the proximal DCA. Numerical experiments on various synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the non-convex penalty MCP in promoting sparsity. Compared with the existing state-of-the-art method, our method is demonstrated to be more efficient and reliable for learning graph Laplacian with MCP.  ( 2 min )

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in generative modeling. Fueled by its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space, recent works built upon it have made interesting attempts aiming at the interpretability of text modeling. However, latent space EBMs also inherit some flaws from EBMs in data space; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice can lead to poor generation quality and instability in training, especially on data with complex latent structures. Inspired by the recent efforts that leverage diffusion recovery likelihood learning as a cure for the sampling issue, we introduce a novel symbiosis between the diffusion models and latent space EBMs in a variational learning framework, coined as the latent diffusion energy-based model. We develop a geometric clustering-based regularization jointly with the information bottleneck to further improve the quality of the learned latent space. Experiments on several challenging tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our model on interpretable text modeling over strong counterparts.  ( 2 min )

Continual learning is a desirable feature in many modern machine learning applications, which allows in-field adaptation and updating, ranging from accommodating distribution shift, to fine-tuning, and to learning new tasks. For applications with privacy and low latency requirements, the compute and memory demands imposed by continual learning can be cost-prohibitive for resource-constraint edge platforms. Reducing computational precision through fully quantized training (FQT) simultaneously reduces memory footprint and increases compute efficiency for both training and inference. However, aggressive quantization especially integer FQT typically degrades model accuracy to unacceptable levels. In this paper, we propose a technique that leverages inexpensive Hadamard transforms to enable low-precision training with only integer matrix multiplications. We further determine which tensors need stochastic rounding and propose tiled matrix multiplication to enable low-bit width accumulators. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on several human activity recognition datasets and CIFAR100 in a class incremental learning setting. We achieve less than 0.5% and 3% accuracy degradation while we quantize all matrix multiplications inputs down to 4-bits with 8-bit accumulators.  ( 2 min )

It is a crucial challenge to reconstruct population dynamics using unlabeled samples from distributions at coarse time intervals. Recent approaches such as flow-based models or Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB) models have demonstrated appealing performance, yet the inferred sample trajectories either fail to account for the underlying stochasticity or are $\underline{D}$eep $\underline{M}$omentum Multi-Marginal $\underline{S}$chr\"odinger $\underline{B}$ridge(DMSB), a novel computational framework that learns the smooth measure-valued spline for stochastic systems that satisfy position marginal constraints across time. By tailoring the celebrated Bregman Iteration and extending the Iteration Proportional Fitting to phase space, we manage to handle high-dimensional multi-marginal trajectory inference tasks efficiently. Our algorithm outperforms baselines significantly, as evidenced by experiments for synthetic datasets and a real-world single-cell RNA sequence dataset. Additionally, the proposed approach can reasonably reconstruct the evolution of velocity distribution, from position snapshots only, when there is a ground truth velocity that is nevertheless inaccessible.  ( 2 min )

We present a simple but effective method to measure and mitigate model biases caused by reliance on spurious cues. Instead of requiring costly changes to one's data or model training, our method better utilizes the data one already has by sorting them. Specifically, we rank images within their classes based on spuriosity (the degree to which common spurious cues are present), proxied via deep neural features of an interpretable network. With spuriosity rankings, it is easy to identify minority subpopulations (i.e. low spuriosity images) and assess model bias as the gap in accuracy between high and low spuriosity images. One can even efficiently remove a model's bias at little cost to accuracy by finetuning its classification head on low spuriosity images, resulting in fairer treatment of samples regardless of spuriosity. We demonstrate our method on ImageNet, annotating $5000$ class-feature dependencies ($630$ of which we find to be spurious) and generating a dataset of $325k$ soft segmentations for these features along the way. Having computed spuriosity rankings via the identified spurious neural features, we assess biases for $89$ diverse models and find that class-wise biases are highly correlated across models. Our results suggest that model bias due to spurious feature reliance is influenced far more by what the model is trained on than how it is trained.  ( 3 min )

Anomaly detection has recently gained increasing attention in the field of computer vision, likely due to its broad set of applications ranging from product fault detection on industrial production lines and impending event detection in video surveillance to finding lesions in medical scans. Regardless of the domain, anomaly detection is typically framed as a one-class classification task, where the learning is conducted on normal examples only. An entire family of successful anomaly detection methods is based on learning to reconstruct masked normal inputs (e.g. patches, future frames, etc.) and exerting the magnitude of the reconstruction error as an indicator for the abnormality level. Unlike other reconstruction-based methods, we present a novel self-supervised masked convolutional transformer block (SSMCTB) that comprises the reconstruction-based functionality at a core architectural level. The proposed self-supervised block is extremely flexible, enabling information masking at any layer of a neural network and being compatible with a wide range of neural architectures. In this work, we extend our previous self-supervised predictive convolutional attentive block (SSPCAB) with a 3D masked convolutional layer, a transformer for channel-wise attention, as well as a novel self-supervised objective based on Huber loss. Furthermore, we show that our block is applicable to a wider variety of tasks, adding anomaly detection in medical images and thermal videos to the previously considered tasks based on RGB images and surveillance videos. We exhibit the generality and flexibility of SSMCTB by integrating it into multiple state-of-the-art neural models for anomaly detection, bringing forth empirical results that confirm considerable performance improvements on five benchmarks. We release our code and data as open source at: https://github.com/ristea/ssmctb.  ( 3 min )

A robot self-model is a task-agnostic representation of the robot's physical morphology that can be used for motion planning tasks in absence of classical geometric kinematic models. In particular, when the latter are hard to engineer or the robot's kinematics change unexpectedly, human-free self-modeling is a necessary feature of truly autonomous agents. In this work, we leverage neural fields to allow a robot to self-model its kinematics as a neural-implicit query model learned only from 2D images annotated with camera poses and configurations. This enables significantly greater applicability than existing approaches which have been dependent on depth images or geometry knowledge. To this end, alongside a curricular data sampling strategy, we propose a new encoder-based neural density field architecture for dynamic object-centric scenes conditioned on high numbers of degrees of freedom (DOFs). In a 7-DOF robot test setup, the learned self-model achieves a Chamfer-L2 distance of 2% of the robot's workspace dimension. We demonstrate the capabilities of this model on a motion planning task as an exemplary downstream application.  ( 2 min )

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems, but also in the training of large language models. In contrast to infinite horizon MDPs optimal policies are not stationary, policies must be learned for every single epoch. In practice all parameters are often trained simultaneously, ignoring the inherent structure suggested by dynamic programming. This paper introduces a combination of dynamic programming and policy gradient called dynamic policy gradient, where the parameters are trained backwards in time. For the tabular softmax parametrisation we carry out the convergence analysis for simultaneous and dynamic policy gradient towards global optima, both in the exact and sampled gradient settings without regularisation. It turns out that the use of dynamic policy gradient training much better exploits the structure of finite-time problems which is reflected in improved convergence bounds.  ( 2 min )

High-quality text embedding is pivotal in improving semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks, which are crucial components in Large Language Model (LLM) applications. However, a common challenge existing text embedding models face is the problem of vanishing gradients, primarily due to their reliance on the cosine function in the optimization objective, which has saturation zones. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel angle-optimized text embedding model called AnglE. The core idea of AnglE is to introduce angle optimization in a complex space. This novel approach effectively mitigates the adverse effects of the saturation zone in the cosine function, which can impede gradient and hinder optimization processes. To set up a comprehensive STS evaluation, we experimented on existing short-text STS datasets and a newly collected long-text STS dataset from GitHub Issues. Furthermore, we examine domain-specific STS scenarios with limited labeled data and explore how AnglE works with LLM-annotated data. Extensive experiments were conducted on various tasks including short-text STS, long-text STS, and domain-specific STS tasks. The results show that AnglE outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) STS models that ignore the cosine saturation zone. These findings demonstrate the ability of AnglE to generate high-quality text embeddings and the usefulness of angle optimization in STS.  ( 2 min )

The recently released GPT-4 Code Interpreter has demonstrated remarkable proficiency in solving challenging math problems, primarily attributed to its ability to seamlessly reason with natural language, generate code, execute code, and continue reasoning based on the execution output. In this paper, we present a method to fine-tune open-source language models, enabling them to use code for modeling and deriving math equations and, consequently, enhancing their mathematical reasoning abilities. We propose a method of generating novel and high-quality datasets with math problems and their code-based solutions, referred to as MathCodeInstruct. Each solution interleaves natural language, code, and execution results. We also introduce a customized supervised fine-tuning and inference approach. This approach yields the MathCoder models, a family of models capable of generating code-based solutions for solving challenging math problems. Impressively, the MathCoder models achieve state-of-the-art scores among open-source LLMs on the MATH (45.2%) and GSM8K (83.9%) datasets, substantially outperforming other open-source alternatives. Notably, the MathCoder model not only surpasses ChatGPT-3.5 and PaLM-2 on GSM8K and MATH but also outperforms GPT-4 on the competition-level MATH dataset. The dataset and models will be released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder.  ( 2 min )

Differentiable logics (DL) have recently been proposed as a method of training neural networks to satisfy logical specifications. A DL consists of a syntax in which specifications are stated and an interpretation function that translates expressions in the syntax into loss functions. These loss functions can then be used during training with standard gradient descent algorithms. The variety of existing DLs and the differing levels of formality with which they are treated makes a systematic comparative study of their properties and implementations difficult. This paper remedies this problem by suggesting a meta-language for defining DLs that we call the Logic of Differentiable Logics, or LDL. Syntactically, it generalises the syntax of existing DLs to FOL, and for the first time introduces the formalism for reasoning about vectors and learners. Semantically, it introduces a general interpretation function that can be instantiated to define loss functions arising from different existing DLs. We use LDL to establish several theoretical properties of existing DLs, and to conduct their empirical study in neural network verification.  ( 2 min )

Reliability of machine learning evaluation -- the consistency of observed evaluation scores across replicated model training runs -- is affected by several sources of nondeterminism which can be regarded as measurement noise. Current tendencies to remove noise in order to enforce reproducibility of research results neglect inherent nondeterminism at the implementation level and disregard crucial interaction effects between algorithmic noise factors and data properties. This limits the scope of conclusions that can be drawn from such experiments. Instead of removing noise, we propose to incorporate several sources of variance, including their interaction with data properties, into an analysis of significance and reliability of machine learning evaluation, with the aim to draw inferences beyond particular instances of trained models. We show how to use linear mixed effects models (LMEMs) to analyze performance evaluation scores, and to conduct statistical inference with a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). This allows us to incorporate arbitrary sources of noise like meta-parameter variations into statistical significance testing, and to assess performance differences conditional on data properties. Furthermore, a variance component analysis (VCA) enables the analysis of the contribution of noise sources to overall variance and the computation of a reliability coefficient by the ratio of substantial to total variance.  ( 3 min )

Tabular data prediction has been employed in medical applications such as patient health risk prediction. However, existing methods usually revolve around the algorithm design while overlooking the significance of data engineering. Medical tabular datasets frequently exhibit significant heterogeneity across different sources, with limited sample sizes per source. As such, previous predictors are often trained on manually curated small datasets that struggle to generalize across different tabular datasets during inference. This paper proposes to scale medical tabular data predictors (MediTab) to various tabular inputs with varying features. The method uses a data engine that leverages large language models (LLMs) to consolidate tabular samples to overcome the barrier across tables with distinct schema. It also aligns out-domain data with the target task using a "learn, annotate, and refinement" pipeline. The expanded training data then enables the pre-trained MediTab to infer for arbitrary tabular input in the domain without fine-tuning, resulting in significant improvements over supervised baselines: it reaches an average ranking of 1.57 and 1.00 on 7 patient outcome prediction datasets and 3 trial outcome prediction datasets, respectively. In addition, MediTab exhibits impressive zero-shot performances: it outperforms supervised XGBoost models by 8.9% and 17.2% on average in two prediction tasks, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanWangZf/MediTab.  ( 3 min )

The ML community is rapidly exploring techniques for prompting language models (LMs) and for stacking them into pipelines that solve complex tasks. Unfortunately, existing LM pipelines are typically implemented using hard-coded "prompt templates", i.e. lengthy strings discovered via trial and error. Toward a more systematic approach for developing and optimizing LM pipelines, we introduce DSPy, a programming model that abstracts LM pipelines as text transformation graphs, i.e. imperative computational graphs where LMs are invoked through declarative modules. DSPy modules are parameterized, meaning they can learn (by creating and collecting demonstrations) how to apply compositions of prompting, finetuning, augmentation, and reasoning techniques. We design a compiler that will optimize any DSPy pipeline to maximize a given metric. We conduct two case studies, showing that succinct DSPy programs can express and optimize sophisticated LM pipelines that reason about math word problems, tackle multi-hop retrieval, answer complex questions, and control agent loops. Within minutes of compiling, a few lines of DSPy allow GPT-3.5 and llama2-13b-chat to self-bootstrap pipelines that outperform standard few-shot prompting (generally by over 25% and 65%, respectively) and pipelines with expert-created demonstrations (by up to 5-46% and 16-40%, respectively). On top of that, DSPy programs compiled to open and relatively small LMs like 770M-parameter T5 and llama2-13b-chat are competitive with approaches that rely on expert-written prompt chains for proprietary GPT-3.5. DSPy is available at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy  ( 3 min )

Detecting and discovering new gene interactions based on known gene expressions and gene interaction data presents a significant challenge. Various statistical and deep learning methods have attempted to tackle this challenge by leveraging the topological structure of gene interactions and gene expression patterns to predict novel gene interactions. In contrast, some approaches have focused exclusively on utilizing gene expression profiles. In this context, we introduce GENER, a parallel-layer deep learning network designed exclusively for the identification of gene-gene relationships using gene expression data. We conducted two training experiments and compared the performance of our network with that of existing statistical and deep learning approaches. Notably, our model achieved an average AUROC score of 0.834 on the combined BioGRID&DREAM5 dataset, outperforming competing methods in predicting gene-gene interactions.  ( 2 min )

We present two new classes of algorithms for efficient field integration on graphs encoding point clouds. The first class, SeparatorFactorization(SF), leverages the bounded genus of point cloud mesh graphs, while the second class, RFDiffusion(RFD), uses popular epsilon-nearest-neighbor graph representations for point clouds. Both can be viewed as providing the functionality of Fast Multipole Methods (FMMs), which have had a tremendous impact on efficient integration, but for non-Euclidean spaces. We focus on geometries induced by distributions of walk lengths between points (e.g., shortest-path distance). We provide an extensive theoretical analysis of our algorithms, obtaining new results in structural graph theory as a byproduct. We also perform exhaustive empirical evaluation, including on-surface interpolation for rigid and deformable objects (particularly for mesh-dynamics modeling), Wasserstein distance computations for point clouds, and the Gromov-Wasserstein variant.  ( 2 min )

Multimodal learning models have become increasingly important as they surpass single-modality approaches on diverse tasks ranging from question-answering to autonomous driving. Despite the importance of multimodal learning, existing efforts focus on NLP applications, where the number of modalities is typically less than four (audio, video, text, images). However, data inputs in other domains, such as the medical field, may include X-rays, PET scans, MRIs, genetic screening, clinical notes, and more, creating a need for both efficient and accurate information fusion. Many state-of-the-art models rely on pairwise cross-modal attention, which does not scale well for applications with more than three modalities. For $n$ modalities, computing attention will result in $n \choose 2$ operations, potentially requiring considerable amounts of computational resources. To address this, we propose a new domain-neutral attention mechanism, One-Versus-Others (OvO) attention, that scales linearly with the number of modalities and requires only $n$ attention operations, thus offering a significant reduction in computational complexity compared to existing cross-modal attention algorithms. Using three diverse real-world datasets as well as an additional simulation experiment, we show that our method improves performance compared to popular fusion techniques while decreasing computation costs.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning (FL) supports distributed training of a global machine learning model across multiple devices with the help of a central server. However, data heterogeneity across different devices leads to the client model drift issue and results in model performance degradation and poor model fairness. To address the issue, we design Federated learning with global-local Knowledge Fusion (FedKF) scheme in this paper. The key idea in FedKF is to let the server return the global knowledge to be fused with the local knowledge in each training round so that the local model can be regularized towards the global optima. Therefore, the client model drift issue can be mitigated. In FedKF, we first propose the active-inactive model aggregation technique that supports a precise global knowledge representation. Then, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation (KD) approach to enable each client model to learn the global knowledge (embedded in the global model) while each client model can still learn the local knowledge (embedded in the local dataset) simultaneously, thereby realizing the global-local knowledge fusion process. The theoretical analysis and intensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FedKF over previous solutions.  ( 2 min )

Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on custom datasets also encourage this practice. But, what are the safety costs associated with such custom fine-tuning? We note that while existing safety alignment infrastructures can restrict harmful behaviors of LLMs at inference time, they do not cover safety risks when fine-tuning privileges are extended to end-users. Our red teaming studies find that the safety alignment of LLMs can be compromised by fine-tuning with only a few adversarially designed training examples. For instance, we jailbreak GPT-3.5 Turbo's safety guardrails by fine-tuning it on only 10 such examples at a cost of less than $0.20 via OpenAI's APIs, making the model responsive to nearly any harmful instructions. Disconcertingly, our research also reveals that, even without malicious intent, simply fine-tuning with benign and commonly used datasets can also inadvertently degrade the safety alignment of LLMs, though to a lesser extent. These findings suggest that fine-tuning aligned LLMs introduces new safety risks that current safety infrastructures fall short of addressing -- even if a model's initial safety alignment is impeccable, it is not necessarily to be maintained after custom fine-tuning. We outline and critically analyze potential mitigations and advocate for further research efforts toward reinforcing safety protocols for the custom fine-tuning of aligned LLMs.  ( 3 min )

Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) refers to the phenomenon where increasing network depth leads to homogeneous node representations. While previous work has established that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) exponentially lose expressive power, it remains controversial whether the graph attention mechanism can mitigate oversmoothing. In this work, we provide a definitive answer to this question through a rigorous mathematical analysis, by viewing attention-based GNNs as nonlinear time-varying dynamical systems and incorporating tools and techniques from the theory of products of inhomogeneous matrices and the joint spectral radius. We establish that, contrary to popular belief, the graph attention mechanism cannot prevent oversmoothing and loses expressive power exponentially. The proposed framework extends the existing results on oversmoothing for symmetric GCNs to a significantly broader class of GNN models, including random walk GCNs, Graph Attention Networks (GATs) and (graph) transformers. In particular, our analysis accounts for asymmetric, state-dependent and time-varying aggregation operators and a wide range of common nonlinear activation functions, such as ReLU, LeakyReLU, GELU and SiLU.  ( 2 min )

Unsupervised anomaly segmentation aims to detect patterns that are distinct from any patterns processed during training, commonly called abnormal or out-of-distribution patterns, without providing any associated manual segmentations. Since anomalies during deployment can lead to model failure, detecting the anomaly can enhance the reliability of models, which is valuable in high-risk domains like medical imaging. This paper introduces Masked Modality Cycles with Conditional Diffusion (MMCCD), a method that enables segmentation of anomalies across diverse patterns in multimodal MRI. The method is based on two fundamental ideas. First, we propose the use of cyclic modality translation as a mechanism for enabling abnormality detection. Image-translation models learn tissue-specific modality mappings, which are characteristic of tissue physiology. Thus, these learned mappings fail to translate tissues or image patterns that have never been encountered during training, and the error enables their segmentation. Furthermore, we combine image translation with a masked conditional diffusion model, which attempts to `imagine' what tissue exists under a masked area, further exposing unknown patterns as the generative model fails to recreate them. We evaluate our method on a proxy task by training on healthy-looking slices of BraTS2021 multi-modality MRIs and testing on slices with tumors. We show that our method compares favorably to previous unsupervised approaches based on image reconstruction and denoising with autoencoders and diffusion models.  ( 3 min )

We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of the objective function. In the language of simulated annealing, the temperature is state-dependent. With this, we prove the global convergence of the algorithm with an algebraic rate both in probability and in the parameter space. This is a significant improvement over the classical rate from using a more straightforward control of the noise term. The convergence proof is based on the actual discrete setup of the algorithm, not just its continuous limit as often done in the literature. We also present several numerical examples to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the algorithm for reasonably complex objective functions.  ( 2 min )

Generative models inspired by dynamical transport of measure -- such as flows and diffusions -- construct a continuous-time map between two probability densities. Conventionally, one of these is the target density, only accessible through samples, while the other is taken as a simple base density that is data-agnostic. In this work, using the framework of stochastic interpolants, we formalize how to \textit{couple} the base and the target densities. This enables us to incorporate information about class labels or continuous embeddings to construct dynamical transport maps that serve as conditional generative models. We show that these transport maps can be learned by solving a simple square loss regression problem analogous to the standard independent setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of constructing dependent couplings in practice through experiments in super-resolution and in-painting.  ( 2 min )

Existing object-search approaches enable robots to search through free pathways, however, robots operating in unstructured human-centered environments frequently also have to manipulate the environment to their needs. In this work, we introduce a novel interactive multi-object search task in which a robot has to open doors to navigate rooms and search inside cabinets and drawers to find target objects. These new challenges require combining manipulation and navigation skills in unexplored environments. We present HIMOS, a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach that learns to compose exploration, navigation, and manipulation skills. To achieve this, we design an abstract high-level action space around a semantic map memory and leverage the explored environment as instance navigation points. We perform extensive experiments in simulation and the real world that demonstrate that, with accurate perception, the decision making of HIMOS effectively transfers to new environments in a zero-shot manner. It shows robustness to unseen subpolicies, failures in their execution, and different robot kinematics. These capabilities open the door to a wide range of downstream tasks across embodied AI and real-world use cases.  ( 2 min )

Programs involving discontinuities introduced by control flow constructs such as conditional branches pose challenges to mathematical optimization methods that assume a degree of smoothness in the objective function's response surface. Smooth interpretation (SI) is a form of abstract interpretation that approximates the convolution of a program's output with a Gaussian kernel, thus smoothing its output in a principled manner. Here, we combine SI with automatic differentiation (AD) to efficiently compute gradients of smoothed programs. In contrast to AD across a regular program execution, these gradients also capture the effects of alternative control flow paths. The combination of SI with AD enables the direct gradient-based parameter synthesis for branching programs, allowing for instance the calibration of simulation models or their combination with neural network models in machine learning pipelines. We detail the effects of the approximations made for tractability in SI and propose a novel Monte Carlo estimator that avoids the underlying assumptions by estimating the smoothed programs' gradients through a combination of AD and sampling. Using DiscoGrad, our tool for automatically translating simple C++ programs to a smooth differentiable form, we perform an extensive evaluation. We compare the combination of SI with AD and our Monte Carlo estimator to existing gradient-free and stochastic methods on four non-trivial and originally discontinuous problems ranging from classical simulation-based optimization to neural network-driven control. While the optimization progress with the SI-based estimator depends on the complexity of the programs' control flow, our Monte Carlo estimator is competitive in all problems, exhibiting the fastest convergence by a substantial margin in our highest-dimensional problem.  ( 3 min )

As cyclones become more intense due to climate change, the rise of AI-based modelling provides a more affordable and accessible approach compared to traditional methods based on mathematical models. This work leverages diffusion models to forecast cyclone trajectories and precipitation patterns by integrating satellite imaging, remote sensing, and atmospheric data, employing a cascaded approach that incorporates forecasting, super-resolution, and precipitation modelling, with training on a dataset of 51 cyclones from six major basins. Experiments demonstrate that the final forecasts from the cascaded models show accurate predictions up to a 36-hour rollout, with SSIM and PSNR values exceeding 0.5 and 20 dB, respectively, for all three tasks. This work also highlights the promising efficiency of AI methods such as diffusion models for high-performance needs, such as cyclone forecasting, while remaining computationally affordable, making them ideal for highly vulnerable regions with critical forecasting needs and financial limitations. Code accessible at \url{https://github.com/nathzi1505/forecast-diffmodels}.  ( 2 min )

An extension of Transformers is proposed that enables explicit relational reasoning through a novel module called the Abstractor. At the core of the Abstractor is a variant of attention called relational cross-attention. The approach is motivated by an architectural inductive bias for relational learning that disentangles relational information from extraneous features about individual objects. This enables explicit relational reasoning, supporting abstraction and generalization from limited data. The Abstractor is first evaluated on simple discriminative relational tasks and compared to existing relational architectures. Next, the Abstractor is evaluated on purely relational sequence-to-sequence tasks, where dramatic improvements are seen in sample efficiency compared to standard Transformers. Finally, Abstractors are evaluated on a collection of tasks based on mathematical problem solving, where modest but consistent improvements in performance and sample efficiency are observed.  ( 2 min )

In this work, we consider the general problem of constructing a neural network surrogate model using multi-fidelity information. Given an inexpensive low-fidelity and an expensive high-fidelity computational model, we present a residual multi-fidelity computational framework that formulates the correlation between models as a residual function, a possibly non-linear mapping between 1) the shared input space of the models together with the low-fidelity model output and 2) the discrepancy between the two model outputs. To accomplish this, we train two neural networks to work in concert. The first network learns the residual function on a small set of high-fidelity and low-fidelity data. Once trained, this network is used to generate additional synthetic high-fidelity data, which is used in the training of a second network. This second network, once trained, acts as our surrogate for the high-fidelity quantity of interest. We present three numerical examples to demonstrate the power of the proposed framework. In particular, we show that dramatic savings in computational cost may be achieved when the output predictions are desired to be accurate within small tolerances.  ( 2 min )

The one of the significant challenges faced by autonomous robotic ultrasound systems is acquiring high-quality images across different patients. The proper orientation of the robotized probe plays a crucial role in governing the quality of ultrasound images. To address this challenge, we propose a sample-efficient method to automatically adjust the orientation of the ultrasound probe normal to the point of contact on the scanning surface, thereby improving the acoustic coupling of the probe and resulting image quality. Our method utilizes Bayesian Optimization (BO) based search on the scanning surface to efficiently search for the normalized probe orientation. We formulate a novel objective function for BO that leverages the contact force measurements and underlying mechanics to identify the normal. We further incorporate a regularization scheme in BO to handle the noisy objective function. The performance of the proposed strategy has been assessed through experiments on urinary bladder phantoms. These phantoms included planar, tilted, and rough surfaces, and were examined using both linear and convex probes with varying search space limits. Further, simulation-based studies have been carried out using 3D human mesh models. The results demonstrate that the mean ($\pm$SD) absolute angular error averaged over all phantoms and 3D models is $\boldsymbol{2.4\pm0.7^\circ}$ and $\boldsymbol{2.1\pm1.3^\circ}$, respectively.  ( 2 min )

A prominent theory of affective response to music revolves around the concepts of surprisal and expectation. In prior work, this idea has been operationalized in the form of probabilistic models of music which allow for precise computation of song (or note-by-note) probabilities, conditioned on a 'training set' of prior musical or cultural experiences. To date, however, these models have been limited to compute exact probabilities through hand-crafted features or restricted to linear models which are likely not sufficient to represent the complex conditional distributions present in music. In this work, we propose to use modern deep probabilistic generative models in the form of a Diffusion Model to compute an approximate likelihood of a musical input sequence. Unlike prior work, such a generative model parameterized by deep neural networks is able to learn complex non-linear features directly from a training set itself. In doing so, we expect to find that such models are able to more accurately represent the 'surprisal' of music for human listeners. From the literature, it is known that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between surprisal and the amount human subjects 'like' a given song. In this work we show that pre-trained diffusion models indeed yield musical surprisal values which exhibit a negative quadratic relationship with measured subject 'liking' ratings, and that the quality of this relationship is competitive with state of the art methods such as IDyOM. We therefore present this model a preliminary step in developing modern deep generative models of music expectation and subjective likability.  ( 2 min )

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on training reward-maximizing agents subject to pre-defined safety constraints. Yet, learning versatile safe policies that can adapt to varying safety constraint requirements during deployment without retraining remains a largely unexplored and challenging area. In this work, we formulate the versatile safe RL problem and consider two primary requirements: training efficiency and zero-shot adaptation capability. To address them, we introduce the Conditioned Constrained Policy Optimization (CCPO) framework, consisting of two key modules: (1) Versatile Value Estimation (VVE) for approximating value functions under unseen threshold conditions, and (2) Conditioned Variational Inference (CVI) for encoding arbitrary constraint thresholds during policy optimization. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CCPO outperforms the baselines in terms of safety and task performance while preserving zero-shot adaptation capabilities to different constraint thresholds data-efficiently. This makes our approach suitable for real-world dynamic applications.  ( 2 min )

The mathematical forces at work behind Generative Adversarial Networks raise challenging theoretical issues. Motivated by the important question of characterizing the geometrical properties of the generated distributions, we provide a thorough analysis of Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) in both the finite sample and asymptotic regimes. We study the specific case where the latent space is univariate and derive results valid regardless of the dimension of the output space. We show in particular that for a fixed sample size, the optimal WGANs are closely linked with connected paths minimizing the sum of the squared Euclidean distances between the sample points. We also highlight the fact that WGANs are able to approach (for the 1-Wasserstein distance) the target distribution as the sample size tends to infinity, at a given convergence rate and provided the family of generative Lipschitz functions grows appropriately. We derive in passing new results on optimal transport theory in the semi-discrete setting.  ( 2 min )

A key limitation preventing the wider adoption of autonomous agents trained via deep reinforcement learning (RL) is their limited ability to generalise to new environments, even when these share similar characteristics with environments encountered during training. In this work, we investigate how a non-uniform sampling strategy of individual environment instances, or levels, affects the zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) ability of RL agents, considering two failure modes: overfitting and over-generalisation. As a first step, we measure the mutual information (MI) between the agent's internal representation and the set of training levels, which we find to be well-correlated to instance overfitting. In contrast to uniform sampling, adaptive sampling strategies prioritising levels based on their value loss are more effective at maintaining lower MI, which provides a novel theoretical justification for this class of techniques. We then turn our attention to unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, which adaptively generate new training levels and minimise MI more effectively than methods sampling from a fixed set. However, we find UED methods significantly shift the training distribution, resulting in over-generalisation and worse ZSG performance over the distribution of interest. To prevent both instance overfitting and over-generalisation, we introduce self-supervised environment design (SSED). SSED generates levels using a variational autoencoder, effectively reducing MI while minimising the shift with the distribution of interest, and leads to statistically significant improvements in ZSG over fixed-set level sampling strategies and UED methods.  ( 3 min )

Preserving individual privacy while enabling collaborative data sharing is crucial for organizations. Synthetic data generation is one solution, producing artificial data that mirrors the statistical properties of private data. While numerous techniques have been devised under differential privacy, they predominantly assume data is centralized. However, data is often distributed across multiple clients in a federated manner. In this work, we initiate the study of federated synthetic tabular data generation. Building upon a SOTA central method known as AIM, we present DistAIM and FLAIM. We show it is straightforward to distribute AIM, extending a recent approach based on secure multi-party computation which necessitates additional overhead, making it less suited to federated scenarios. We then demonstrate that naively federating AIM can lead to substantial degradation in utility under the presence of heterogeneity. To mitigate both issues, we propose an augmented FLAIM approach that maintains a private proxy of heterogeneity. We simulate our methods across a range of benchmark datasets under different degrees of heterogeneity and show this can improve utility while reducing overhead.  ( 2 min )

Advancements in genomic research such as high-throughput sequencing techniques have driven modern genomic studies into "big data" disciplines. This data explosion is constantly challenging conventional methods used in genomics. In parallel with the urgent demand for robust algorithms, deep learning has succeeded in a variety of fields such as vision, speech, and text processing. Yet genomics entails unique challenges to deep learning since we are expecting from deep learning a superhuman intelligence that explores beyond our knowledge to interpret the genome. A powerful deep learning model should rely on insightful utilization of task-specific knowledge. In this paper, we briefly discuss the strengths of different deep learning models from a genomic perspective so as to fit each particular task with a proper deep architecture, and remark on practical considerations of developing modern deep learning architectures for genomics. We also provide a concise review of deep learning applications in various aspects of genomic research, as well as pointing out potential opportunities and obstacles for future genomics applications.  ( 2 min )

We design controlled experiments to study HOW generative language models, like GPT, learn context-free grammars (CFGs) -- diverse language systems with a tree-like structure capturing many aspects of natural languages, programs, and logics. CFGs are as hard as pushdown automata, and can be ambiguous so that verifying if a string satisfies the rules requires dynamic programming. We construct synthetic data and demonstrate that even for difficult (long and ambiguous) CFGs, pre-trained transformers can learn to generate sentences with near-perfect accuracy and impressive diversity. More importantly, we delve into the physical principles behind how transformers learns CFGs. We discover that the hidden states within the transformer implicitly and precisely encode the CFG structure (such as putting tree node information exactly on the subtree boundary), and learn to form "boundary to boundary" attentions resembling dynamic programming. We also cover some extension of CFGs as well as the robustness aspect of transformers against grammar mistakes. Overall, our research provides a comprehensive and empirical understanding of how transformers learn CFGs, and reveals the physical mechanisms utilized by transformers to capture the structure and rules of languages.  ( 2 min )

Recent results suggest that splitting topological navigation into robot-independent and robot-specific components improves navigation performance by enabling the robot-independent part to be trained with data collected by different robot types. However, the navigation methods are still limited by the scarcity of suitable training data and suffer from poor computational scaling. In this work, we present PlaceNav, subdividing the robot-independent part into navigation-specific and generic computer vision components. We utilize visual place recognition for the subgoal selection of the topological navigation pipeline. This makes subgoal selection more efficient and enables leveraging large-scale datasets from non-robotics sources, increasing training data availability. Bayesian filtering, enabled by place recognition, further improves navigation performance by increasing the temporal consistency of subgoals. Our experimental results verify the design and the new model obtains a 76% higher success rate in indoor and 23% higher in outdoor navigation tasks with higher computational efficiency.  ( 2 min )

In 1976, Lai constructed a nontrivial confidence sequence for the mean $\mu$ of a Gaussian distribution with unknown variance $\sigma$. Curiously, he employed both an improper (right Haar) mixture over $\sigma$ and an improper (flat) mixture over $\mu$. Here, we elaborate carefully on the details of his construction, which use generalized nonintegrable martingales and an extended Ville's inequality. While this does yield a sequential t-test, it does not yield an ``e-process'' (due to the nonintegrability of his martingale). In this paper, we develop two new e-processes and confidence sequences for the same setting: one is a test martingale in a reduced filtration, while the other is an e-process in the canonical data filtration. These are respectively obtained by swapping Lai's flat mixture for a Gaussian mixture, and swapping the right Haar mixture over $\sigma$ with the maximum likelihood estimate under the null, as done in universal inference. We also analyze the width of resulting confidence sequences, which have a curious dependence on the error probability $\alpha$. Numerical experiments are provided along the way to compare and contrast the various approaches.  ( 2 min )

Measures of power grid vulnerability are often assessed by the amount of damage an adversary can exact on the network. However, the cascading impact of such attacks is often overlooked, even though cascades are one of the primary causes of large-scale blackouts. This paper explores modifications of transmission line protection settings as candidates for adversarial attacks, which can remain undetectable as long as the network equilibrium state remains unaltered. This forms the basis of a black-box function in a Bayesian optimization procedure, where the objective is to find protection settings that maximize network degradation due to cascading. Notably, our proposed method is agnostic to the choice of the cascade simulator and its underlying assumptions. Numerical experiments reveal that, against conventional wisdom, maximally misconfiguring the protection settings of all network lines does not cause the most cascading. More surprisingly, even when the degree of misconfiguration is limited due to resource constraints, it is still possible to find settings that produce cascades comparable in severity to instances where there are no resource constraints.  ( 2 min )

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing a range of instruction following tasks in few and zero-shot settings. However, teaching LLMs to perform tasks on the web presents fundamental challenges -- combinatorially large open-world tasks and variations across web interfaces. We tackle these challenges by leveraging LLMs to decompose web tasks into a collection of sub-tasks, each of which can be solved by a low-level, closed-loop policy. These policies constitute a shared grammar across tasks, i.e., new web tasks can be expressed as a composition of these policies. We propose a novel framework, Hierarchical Policies for Web Actions using LLMs (HeaP), that learns a set of hierarchical LLM prompts from demonstrations for planning high-level tasks and executing them via a sequence of low-level policies. We evaluate HeaP against a range of baselines on a suite of web tasks, including MiniWoB++, WebArena, a mock airline CRM, as well as live website interactions, and show that it is able to outperform prior works using orders of magnitude less data.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we introduce a novel class of graphical models for representing time lag specific causal relationships and independencies of multivariate time series with unobserved confounders. We completely characterize these graphs and show that they constitute proper subsets of the currently employed model classes. As we show, from the novel graphs one can thus draw stronger causal inferences -- without additional assumptions. We further introduce a graphical representation of Markov equivalence classes of the novel graphs. This graphical representation contains more causal knowledge than what current state-of-the-art causal discovery algorithms learn.  ( 2 min )

Machine learning classification problems are widespread in bioinformatics, but the technical knowledge required to perform model training, optimization, and inference can prevent researchers from utilizing this technology. This article presents an automated tool for machine learning classification problems to simplify the process of training models and producing results while providing informative visualizations and insights into the data. This tool supports both binary and multiclass classification problems, and it provides access to a variety of models and methods. Synthetic data can be generated within the interface to fill missing values, balance class labels, or generate entirely new datasets. It also provides support for feature evaluation and generates explainability scores to indicate which features influence the output the most. We present CLASSify, an open-source tool for simplifying the user experience of solving classification problems without the need for knowledge of machine learning.  ( 2 min )

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an essential signal in monitoring human heart activities. Researchers have achieved promising results in leveraging ECGs in clinical applications with deep learning models. However, the mainstream deep learning approaches usually neglect the periodic and formative attribute of the ECG heartbeat waveform. In this work, we propose a novel ECG-Segment based Learning (ECG-SL) framework to explicitly model the periodic nature of ECG signals. More specifically, ECG signals are first split into heartbeat segments, and then structural features are extracted from each of the segments. Based on the structural features, a temporal model is designed to learn the temporal information for various clinical tasks. Further, due to the fact that massive ECG signals are available but the labeled data are very limited, we also explore self-supervised learning strategy to pre-train the models, resulting significant improvement for downstream tasks. The proposed method outperforms the baseline model and shows competitive performances compared with task-specific methods in three clinical applications: cardiac condition diagnosis, sleep apnea detection, and arrhythmia classification. Further, we find that the ECG-SL tends to focus more on each heartbeat's peak and ST range than ResNet by visualizing the saliency maps.  ( 2 min )

Peptides are formed by the dehydration condensation of multiple amino acids. The primary structure of a peptide can be represented either as an amino acid sequence or as a molecular graph consisting of atoms and chemical bonds. Previous studies have indicated that deep learning routes specific to sequential and graphical peptide forms exhibit comparable performance on downstream tasks. Despite the fact that these models learn representations of the same modality of peptides, we find that they explain their predictions differently. Considering sequential and graphical models as two experts making inferences from different perspectives, we work on fusing expert knowledge to enrich the learned representations for improving the discriminative performance. To achieve this, we propose a peptide co-modeling method, RepCon, which employs a contrastive learning-based framework to enhance the mutual information of representations from decoupled sequential and graphical end-to-end models. It considers representations from the sequential encoder and the graphical encoder for the same peptide sample as a positive pair and learns to enhance the consistency of representations between positive sample pairs and to repel representations between negative pairs. Empirical studies of RepCon and other co-modeling methods are conducted on open-source discriminative datasets, including aggregation propensity, retention time, antimicrobial peptide prediction, and family classification from Peptide Database. Our results demonstrate the superiority of the co-modeling approach over independent modeling, as well as the superiority of RepCon over other methods under the co-modeling framework. In addition, the attribution on RepCon further corroborates the validity of the approach at the level of model explanation.  ( 3 min )

LiDAR sensors are used in autonomous driving applications to accurately perceive the environment. However, they are affected by adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog, and rain. These everyday phenomena introduce unwanted noise into the measurements, severely degrading the performance of LiDAR-based perception systems. In this work, we propose a framework for improving the robustness of LiDAR-based 3D object detectors against road spray. Our approach uses a state-of-the-art adverse weather detection network to filter out spray from the LiDAR point cloud, which is then used as input for the object detector. In this way, the detected objects are less affected by the adverse weather in the scene, resulting in a more accurate perception of the environment. In addition to adverse weather filtering, we explore the use of radar targets to further filter false positive detections. Tests on real-world data show that our approach improves the robustness to road spray of several popular 3D object detectors.  ( 2 min )

Owing to the prohibitive costs of generating large amounts of labeled data, programmatic weak supervision is a growing paradigm within machine learning. In this setting, users design heuristics that provide noisy labels for subsets of the data. These weak labels are combined (typically via a graphical model) to form pseudolabels, which are then used to train a downstream model. In this work, we question a foundational premise of the typical weakly supervised learning pipeline: given that the heuristic provides all ``label" information, why do we need to generate pseudolabels at all? Instead, we propose to directly transform the heuristics themselves into corresponding loss functions that penalize differences between our model and the heuristic. By constructing losses directly from the heuristics, we can incorporate more information than is used in the standard weakly supervised pipeline, such as how the heuristics make their decisions, which explicitly informs feature selection during training. We call our method Losses over Labels (LoL) as it creates losses directly from heuristics without going through the intermediate step of a label. We show that LoL improves upon existing weak supervision methods on several benchmark text and image classification tasks and further demonstrate that incorporating gradient information leads to better performance on almost every task.  ( 2 min )

Language models (LMs), despite aligning well with an average labeler through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), may not universally suit diverse human preferences. Recent approaches therefore opt for customization by collecting multi-dimensional feedback and creating distinct rewards for each dimension (e.g., helpfulness, harmlessness, honesty). LMs can then be tailored to different preferences using multi-objective RL (MORL) with different reward weightings. Yet, RL fine-tuning is unstable and resource-heavy, especially for MORLHF with diverse and usually conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO), an RL-free algorithm that extends Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for multiple alignment objectives. Essentially, MODPO trains different LMs to represent different collective reward models that combine all objectives with specific weightings. With a simple cross-entropy loss, the LMs optimized against the MODPO objective are analytically the exact solutions of the original MORLHF objective. Empirical results in safety alignment and long-form question answering confirm that MODPO matches or outperforms existing methods, efficiently producing a Pareto-optimal set of LMs that cater to diverse preferences with 3 times less computational resources compared with MORLHF.  ( 2 min )

Great successes have been reported using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align large language models. Open-source preference datasets and reward models have enabled wider experimentation beyond generic chat settings, particularly to make systems more "helpful" for tasks like web question answering, summarization, and multi-turn dialogue. When optimizing for helpfulness, RLHF has been consistently observed to drive models to produce longer outputs. This paper demonstrates that optimizing for response length is a significant factor behind RLHF's reported improvements in these settings. First, we study the relationship between reward and length for reward models trained on three open-source preference datasets for helpfulness. Here, length correlates strongly with reward, and improvements in reward score are driven in large part by shifting the distribution over output lengths. We then explore interventions during both RL and reward model learning to see if we can achieve the same downstream improvements as RLHF without increasing length. While our interventions mitigate length increases, they aren't uniformly effective across settings. Furthermore, we find that even running RLHF with a reward based solely on length can reproduce most of the downstream improvements over the initial policy model, showing that reward models in these settings have a long way to go.  ( 2 min )

Both centralized and decentralized approaches have shown excellent performance and great application value in federated learning (FL). However, current studies do not provide sufficient evidence to show which one performs better. Although from the optimization perspective, decentralized methods can approach the comparable convergence of centralized methods with less communication, its test performance has always been inefficient in empirical studies. To comprehensively explore their behaviors in FL, we study their excess risks, including the joint analysis of both optimization and generalization. We prove that on smooth non-convex objectives, 1) centralized FL (CFL) always generalizes better than decentralized FL (DFL); 2) from perspectives of the excess risk and test error in CFL, adopting partial participation is superior to full participation; and, 3) there is a necessary requirement for the topology in DFL to avoid performance collapse as the training scale increases. Based on some simple hardware metrics, we could evaluate which framework is better in practice. Extensive experiments are conducted on common setups in FL to validate that our theoretical analysis is contextually valid in practical scenarios.  ( 2 min )

The way users acquire information is undergoing a paradigm shift with the advent of ChatGPT. Unlike conventional search engines, ChatGPT retrieves knowledge from the model itself and generates answers for users. ChatGPT's impressive question-answering (QA) capability has attracted more than 100 million users within a short period of time but has also raised concerns regarding its reliability. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale measurement of ChatGPT's reliability in the generic QA scenario with a carefully curated set of 5,695 questions across ten datasets and eight domains. We find that ChatGPT's reliability varies across different domains, especially underperforming in law and science questions. We also demonstrate that system roles, originally designed by OpenAI to allow users to steer ChatGPT's behavior, can impact ChatGPT's reliability in an imperceptible way. We further show that ChatGPT is vulnerable to adversarial examples, and even a single character change can negatively affect its reliability in certain cases. We believe that our study provides valuable insights into ChatGPT's reliability and underscores the need for strengthening the reliability and security of large language models (LLMs).  ( 2 min )

A broad current application of algorithms is in formal and quantitative measures of murky concepts -- like merit -- to make decisions. When people strategically respond to these sorts of evaluations in order to gain favorable decision outcomes, their behavior can be subjected to moral judgments. They may be described as 'gaming the system' or 'cheating,' or (in other cases) investing 'honest effort' or 'improving.' Machine learning literature on strategic behavior has tried to describe these dynamics by emphasizing the efforts expended by decision subjects hoping to obtain a more favorable assessment -- some works offer ways to preempt or prevent such manipulations, some differentiate 'gaming' from 'improvement' behavior, while others aim to measure the effort burden or disparate effects of classification systems. We begin from a different starting point: that the design of an evaluation itself can be understood as furthering goals held by the evaluator which may be misaligned with broader societal goals. To develop the idea that evaluation represents a strategic interaction in which both the evaluator and the subject of their evaluation are operating out of self-interest, we put forward a model that represents the process of evaluation using three interacting agents: a decision subject, an evaluator, and society, representing a bundle of values and oversight mechanisms. We highlight our model's applicability to a number of social systems where one or two players strategically undermine the others' interests to advance their own. Treating evaluators as themselves strategic allows us to re-cast the scrutiny directed at decision subjects, towards the incentives that underpin institutional designs of evaluations. The moral standing of strategic behaviors often depend on the moral standing of the evaluations and incentives that provoke such behaviors.

Data-driven constitutive modeling with neural networks has received increased interest in recent years due to its ability to easily incorporate physical and mechanistic constraints and to overcome the challenging and time-consuming task of formulating phenomenological constitutive laws that can accurately capture the observed material response. However, even though neural network-based constitutive laws have been shown to generalize proficiently, the generated representations are not easily interpretable due to their high number of trainable parameters. Sparse regression approaches exist that allow to obtaining interpretable expressions, but the user is tasked with creating a library of model forms which by construction limits their expressiveness to the functional forms provided in the libraries. In this work, we propose to train regularized physics-augmented neural network-based constitutive models utilizing a smoothed version of $L^{0}$-regularization. This aims to maintain the trustworthiness inherited by the physical constraints, but also enables interpretability which has not been possible thus far on any type of machine learning-based constitutive model where model forms were not assumed a-priory but were actually discovered. During the training process, the network simultaneously fits the training data and penalizes the number of active parameters, while also ensuring constitutive constraints such as thermodynamic consistency. We show that the method can reliably obtain interpretable and trustworthy constitutive models for compressible and incompressible hyperelasticity, yield functions, and hardening models for elastoplasticity, for synthetic and experimental data.

Network alignment is the task of establishing one-to-one correspondences between the nodes of different graphs and finds a plethora of applications in high-impact domains. However, this task is known to be NP-hard in its general form, and existing algorithms do not scale up as the size of the graphs increases. To tackle both challenges we propose a novel generalized graph autoencoder architecture, designed to extract powerful and robust node embeddings, that are tailored to the alignment task. We prove that the generated embeddings are associated with the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the graphs and can achieve more accurate alignment compared to classical spectral methods. Our proposed framework also leverages transfer learning and data augmentation to achieve efficient network alignment at a very large scale without retraining. Extensive experiments on both network and sub-network alignment with real-world graphs provide corroborating evidence supporting the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach.

Diffusion models, as a kind of powerful generative model, have given impressive results on image super-resolution (SR) tasks. However, due to the randomness introduced in the reverse process of diffusion models, the performances of diffusion-based SR models are fluctuating at every time of sampling, especially for samplers with few resampled steps. This inherent randomness of diffusion models results in ineffectiveness and instability, making it challenging for users to guarantee the quality of SR results. However, our work takes this randomness as an opportunity: fully analyzing and leveraging it leads to the construction of an effective plug-and-play sampling method that owns the potential to benefit a series of diffusion-based SR methods. More in detail, we propose to steadily sample high-quality SR images from pre-trained diffusion-based SR models by solving diffusion ordinary differential equations (diffusion ODEs) with optimal boundary conditions (BCs) and analyze the characteristics between the choices of BCs and their corresponding SR results. Our analysis shows the route to obtain an approximately optimal BC via an efficient exploration in the whole space. The quality of SR results sampled by the proposed method with fewer steps outperforms the quality of results sampled by current methods with randomness from the same pre-trained diffusion-based SR model, which means that our sampling method "boosts" current diffusion-based SR models without any additional training.

We investigate the variational optimality (specifically, the Banach space optimality) of a large class of neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities/activation functions. To that end, we construct a new family of Banach spaces defined via a regularization operator and the $k$-plane transform. We prove a representer theorem that states that the solution sets to learning problems posed over these Banach spaces are completely characterized by neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities. These optimal architectures have skip connections and are tightly connected to orthogonal weight normalization and multi-index models, both of which have received considerable interest in the neural network community. Our framework is compatible with a number of classical nonlinearities including the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, the norm activation function, and the radial basis functions found in the theory of thin-plate/polyharmonic splines. We also show that the underlying spaces are special instances of reproducing kernel Banach spaces and variation spaces. Our results shed light on the regularity of functions learned by neural networks trained on data, particularly with multivariate nonlinearities, and provide new theoretical motivation for several architectural choices found in practice.

Due to the large-scale availability of data, machine learning (ML) algorithms are being deployed in distributed topologies, where different nodes collaborate to train ML models over their individual data by exchanging model-related information (e.g., gradients) with a central server. However, distributed learning schemes are notably vulnerable to two threats. First, Byzantine nodes can single-handedly corrupt the learning by sending incorrect information to the server, e.g., erroneous gradients. The standard approach to mitigate such behavior is to use a non-linear robust aggregation method at the server. Second, the server can violate the privacy of the nodes. Recent attacks have shown that exchanging (unencrypted) gradients enables a curious server to recover the totality of the nodes' data. The use of homomorphic encryption (HE), a gold standard security primitive, has extensively been studied as a privacy-preserving solution to distributed learning in non-Byzantine scenarios. However, due to HE's large computational demand especially for high-dimensional ML models, there has not yet been any attempt to design purely homomorphic operators for non-linear robust aggregators. In this work, we present SABLE, the first completely homomorphic and Byzantine robust distributed learning algorithm. SABLE essentially relies on a novel plaintext encoding method that enables us to implement the robust aggregator over batching-friendly BGV. Moreover, this encoding scheme also accelerates state-of-the-art homomorphic sorting with larger security margins and smaller ciphertext size. We perform extensive experiments on image classification tasks and show that our algorithm achieves practical execution times while matching the ML performance of its non-private counterpart.

Accurate precipitation forecasting is a vital challenge of both scientific and societal importance. Data-driven approaches have emerged as a widely used solution for addressing this challenge. However, solely relying on data-driven approaches has limitations in modeling the underlying physics, making accurate predictions difficult. Coupling AI-based post-processing techniques with traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) methods offers a more effective solution for improving forecasting accuracy. Despite previous post-processing efforts, accurately predicting heavy rainfall remains challenging due to the imbalanced precipitation data across locations and complex relationships between multiple meteorological variables. To address these limitations, we introduce the PostRainBench, a comprehensive multi-variable NWP post-processing benchmark consisting of three datasets for NWP post-processing-based precipitation forecasting. We propose CAMT, a simple yet effective Channel Attention Enhanced Multi-task Learning framework with a specially designed weighted loss function. Its flexible design allows for easy plug-and-play integration with various backbones. Extensive experimental results on the proposed benchmark show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.3%, 4.7%, and 26.8% in rain CSI on the three datasets respectively. Most notably, our model is the first deep learning-based method to outperform traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) approaches in extreme precipitation conditions. It shows improvements of 15.6%, 17.4%, and 31.8% over NWP predictions in heavy rain CSI on respective datasets. These results highlight the potential impact of our model in reducing the severe consequences of extreme weather events.

Since ChatGPT has emerged as a major AIGC model, providing high-quality responses across a wide range of applications (including software development and maintenance), it has attracted much interest from many individuals. ChatGPT has great promise, but there are serious problems that might arise from its misuse, especially in the realms of education and public safety. Several AIGC detectors are available, and they have all been tested on genuine text. However, more study is needed to see how effective they are for multi-domain ChatGPT material. This study aims to fill this need by creating a multi-domain dataset for testing the state-of-the-art APIs and tools for detecting artificially generated information used by universities and other research institutions. A large dataset consisting of articles, abstracts, stories, news, and product reviews was created for this study. The second step is to use the newly created dataset to put six tools through their paces. Six different artificial intelligence (AI) text identification systems, including "GPTkit," "GPTZero," "Originality," "Sapling," "Writer," and "Zylalab," have accuracy rates between 55.29 and 97.0%. Although all the tools fared well in the evaluations, originality was particularly effective across the board.

Human motion prediction is an essential step for efficient and safe human-robot collaboration. Current methods either purely rely on representing the human joints in some form of neural network-based architecture or use regression models offline to fit hyper-parameters in the hope of capturing a model encompassing human motion. While these methods provide good initial results, they are missing out on leveraging well-studied human body kinematic models as well as body and scene constraints which can help boost the efficacy of these prediction frameworks while also explicitly avoiding implausible human joint configurations. We propose a novel human motion prediction framework that incorporates human joint constraints and scene constraints in a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model to predict human motion over a set time horizon. This formulation is combined with an online context-aware constraints model to leverage task-dependent motions. It is tested on a human arm kinematic model and implemented on a human-robot collaborative setup with a UR5 robot arm to demonstrate the real-time capability of our approach. Simulations were also performed on datasets like HA4M and ANDY. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate considerable improvements in a Gaussian Process framework when these constraints are explicitly considered.

Pulmonary diseases rank prominently among the principal causes of death worldwide. Curing them will require, among other things, a better understanding of the many complex 3D tree-shaped structures within the pulmonary system, such as airways, arteries, and veins. In theory, they can be modeled using high-resolution image stacks. Unfortunately, standard CNN approaches operating on dense voxel grids are prohibitively expensive. To remedy this, we introduce a point-based approach that preserves graph connectivity of tree skeleton and incorporates an implicit surface representation. It delivers SOTA accuracy at a low computational cost and the resulting models have usable surfaces. Due to the scarcity of publicly accessible data, we have also curated an extensive dataset to evaluate our approach and will make it public.

Self-play (SP) is a popular multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for solving competitive games, where each agent optimizes policy by treating others as part of the environment. Despite the empirical successes, the theoretical properties of SP-based methods are limited to two-player zero-sum games. However, for mixed cooperative-competitive games where agents on the same team need to cooperate with each other, we can show a simple counter-example where SP-based methods cannot converge to a global Nash equilibrium (NE) with high probability. Alternatively, Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) is an iterative framework for learning NE, where the best responses w.r.t. previous policies are learned in each iteration. PSRO can be directly extended to mixed cooperative-competitive settings by jointly learning team best responses with all convergence properties unchanged. However, PSRO requires repeatedly training joint policies from scratch till convergence, which makes it hard to scale to complex games. In this work, we develop a novel algorithm, Fictitious Cross-Play (FXP), which inherits the benefits from both frameworks. FXP simultaneously trains an SP-based main policy and a counter population of best response policies. The main policy is trained by fictitious self-play and cross-play against the counter population, while the counter policies are trained as the best responses to the main policy's past versions. We validate our method in matrix games and show that FXP converges to global NEs while SP methods fail. We also conduct experiments in a gridworld domain, where FXP achieves higher Elo ratings and lower exploitabilities than baselines, and a more challenging football game, where FXP defeats SOTA models with over 94% win rate.

The study of interacting dynamical systems continues to attract research interest in various fields of science and engineering. In a collection of interacting particles, the interaction network contains information about how various components interact with one another. Inferring the information about the interaction network from the dynamics of agents is a problem of long-standing interest. In this work, we employ a self-supervised neural network model to achieve two outcomes: to recover the interaction network and to predict the dynamics of individual agents. Both these information are inferred solely from the observed trajectory data. This work presents an application of the Neural Relational Inference model to two dynamical systems: coupled particles mediated by Hooke's law interaction and coupled phase (Kuramoto) oscillators.

Multi-objective learning (MOL) problems often arise in emerging machine learning problems when there are multiple learning criteria, data modalities, or learning tasks. Different from single-objective learning, one of the critical challenges in MOL is the potential conflict among different objectives during the iterative optimization process. Recent works have developed various dynamic weighting algorithms for MOL such as MGDA and its variants, where the central idea is to find an update direction that avoids conflicts among objectives. Albeit its appealing intuition, empirical studies show that dynamic weighting methods may not always outperform static ones. To understand this theory-practical gap, we focus on a new stochastic variant of MGDA - the Multi-objective gradient with Double sampling (MoDo) algorithm, and study the generalization performance of the dynamic weighting-based MoDo and its interplay with optimization through the lens of algorithm stability. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the key rationale behind MGDA -- updating along conflict-avoidant direction - may hinder dynamic weighting algorithms from achieving the optimal ${\cal O}(1/\sqrt{n})$ population risk, where $n$ is the number of training samples. We further demonstrate the impact of the variability of dynamic weights on the three-way trade-off among optimization, generalization, and conflict avoidance that is unique in MOL. We showcase the generality of our theoretical framework by analyzing other existing stochastic MOL algorithms under the framework. Experiments on various multi-task learning benchmarks are performed to demonstrate the practical applicability. Code is available at https://github.com/heshandevaka/Trade-Off-MOL.

Building machines that can reason about physical events and their causal relationships is crucial for flexible interaction with the physical world. However, most existing physical and causal reasoning benchmarks are exclusively based on synthetically generated events and synthetic natural language descriptions of causal relationships. This design brings up two issues. First, there is a lack of diversity in both event types and natural language descriptions; second, causal relationships based on manually-defined heuristics are different from human judgments. To address both shortcomings, we present the CLEVRER-Humans benchmark, a video reasoning dataset for causal judgment of physical events with human labels. We employ two techniques to improve data collection efficiency: first, a novel iterative event cloze task to elicit a new representation of events in videos, which we term Causal Event Graphs (CEGs); second, a data augmentation technique based on neural language generative models. We convert the collected CEGs into questions and answers to be consistent with prior work. Finally, we study a collection of baseline approaches for CLEVRER-Humans question-answering, highlighting the great challenges set forth by our benchmark.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable results for a wide range of tasks. However, deploying these models for inference has been a significant challenge due to their unprecedented resource requirements. This has forced existing deployment frameworks to use multi-GPU inference pipelines, which are often complex and costly, or to use smaller and less performant models. In this work, we demonstrate that the main bottleneck for generative inference with LLMs is memory bandwidth, rather than compute, specifically for single batch inference. While quantization has emerged as a promising solution by representing model weights with reduced precision, previous efforts have often resulted in notable performance degradation. To address this, we introduce SqueezeLLM, a post-training quantization framework that not only enables lossless compression to ultra-low precisions of up to 3-bit, but also achieves higher quantization performance under the same memory constraint. Our framework incorporates two novel ideas: (i) sensitivity-based non-uniform quantization, which searches for the optimal bit precision assignment based on second-order information; and (ii) the Dense-and-Sparse decomposition that stores outliers and sensitive weight values in an efficient sparse format. When applied to the LLaMA models, our 3-bit quantization significantly reduces the perplexity gap from the FP16 baseline by up to 2.1x as compared to the state-of-the-art methods with the same memory requirement. Furthermore, when deployed on an A6000 GPU, our quantized models achieve up to 2.3x speedup compared to the baseline. Our code is open-sourced and available online.

Audio adversarial examples are audio files that have been manipulated to fool an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, while still sounding benign to a human listener. Most methods to generate such samples are based on a two-step algorithm: first, a viable adversarial audio file is produced, then, this is fine-tuned with respect to perceptibility and robustness. In this work, we present an integrated algorithm that uses psychoacoustic models and room impulse responses (RIR) in the generation step. The RIRs are dynamically created by a neural network during the generation process to simulate a physical environment to harden our examples against transformations experienced in over-the-air attacks. We compare the different approaches in three experiments: in a simulated environment and in a realistic over-the-air scenario to evaluate the robustness, and in a human study to evaluate the perceptibility. Our algorithms considering psychoacoustics only or in addition to the robustness show an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as well as in the human perception study, at the cost of an increased word error rate (WER).

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results for real-time control systems, including the domain of plasma magnetic control. However, there are still significant drawbacks compared to traditional feedback control approaches for magnetic confinement. In this work, we address key drawbacks of the RL method; achieving higher control accuracy for desired plasma properties, reducing the steady-state error, and decreasing the required time to learn new tasks. We build on top of \cite{degrave2022magnetic}, and present algorithmic improvements to the agent architecture and training procedure. We present simulation results that show up to 65\% improvement in shape accuracy, achieve substantial reduction in the long-term bias of the plasma current, and additionally reduce the training time required to learn new tasks by a factor of 3 or more. We present new experiments using the upgraded RL-based controllers on the TCV tokamak, which validate the simulation results achieved, and point the way towards routinely achieving accurate discharges using the RL approach.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative condition that precedes progressive and irreversible dementia; thus, predicting its progression over time is vital for clinical diagnosis and treatment. Numerous studies have implemented structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to model AD progression, focusing on three integral aspects: (i) temporal variability, (ii) incomplete observations, and (iii) temporal geometric characteristics. However, deep learning-based approaches regarding data variability and sparsity have yet to consider inherent geometrical properties sufficiently. The ordinary differential equation-based geometric modeling method (ODE-RGRU) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for modeling time-series data by intertwining a recurrent neural network and an ODE in Riemannian space. Despite its achievements, ODE-RGRU encounters limitations when extrapolating positive definite symmetric metrics from incomplete samples, leading to feature reverse occurrences that are particularly problematic, especially within the clinical facet. Therefore, this study proposes a novel geometric learning approach that models longitudinal MRI biomarkers and cognitive scores by combining three modules: topological space shift, ODE-RGRU, and trajectory estimation. We have also developed a training algorithm that integrates manifold mapping with monotonicity constraints to reflect measurement transition irreversibility. We verify our proposed method's efficacy by predicting clinical labels and cognitive scores over time in regular and irregular settings. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze our proposed framework through an ablation study.

Lung cancer is highly lethal, emphasizing the critical need for early detection. However, identifying lung nodules poses significant challenges for radiologists, who rely heavily on their expertise and experience for accurate diagnosis. To address this issue, computer-aided diagnosis systems based on machine learning techniques have emerged to assist doctors in identifying lung nodules from computed tomography (CT) scans. Unfortunately, existing networks in this domain often suffer from computational complexity, leading to high rates of false negatives and false positives, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we present an innovative model that harnesses the strengths of both convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. Inspired by object detection in videos, we treat each 3D CT image as a video, individual slices as frames, and lung nodules as objects, enabling a time-series application. The primary objective of our work is to overcome hardware limitations during model training, allowing for efficient processing of 2D data while utilizing inter-slice information for accurate identification based on 3D image context. We validated the proposed network by applying a 10-fold cross-validation technique to the publicly available Lung Nodule Analysis 2016 dataset. Our proposed architecture achieves an average sensitivity criterion of 97.84% and a competition performance metrics (CPM) of 96.0% with few parameters. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art advancements in lung nodule identification demonstrates the significant accuracy achieved by our proposed model.

Future surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will observe an order of magnitude more astrophysical transient events than any previous survey before. With this deluge of photometric data, it will be impossible for all such events to be classified by humans alone. Recent efforts have sought to leverage machine learning methods to tackle the challenge of astronomical transient classification, with ever improving success. Transformers are a recently developed deep learning architecture, first proposed for natural language processing, that have shown a great deal of recent success. In this work we develop a new transformer architecture, which uses multi-head self attention at its core, for general multi-variate time-series data. Furthermore, the proposed time-series transformer architecture supports the inclusion of an arbitrary number of additional features, while also offering interpretability. We apply the time-series transformer to the task of photometric classification, minimising the reliance of expert domain knowledge for feature selection, while achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art photometric classification methods. We achieve a logarithmic-loss of 0.507 on imbalanced data in a representative setting using data from the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC). Moreover, we achieve a micro-averaged receiver operating characteristic area under curve of 0.98 and micro-averaged precision-recall area under curve of 0.87.

Hyperbolic graph convolutional networks (HGCN) have demonstrated significant potential in extracting information from hierarchical graphs. However, existing HGCNs are limited to shallow architectures, due to the expensive hyperbolic operations and the over-smoothing issue as depth increases. Although in GCNs, treatments have been applied to alleviate over-smoothing, developing a hyperbolic therapy presents distinct challenges since operations should be carefully designed to fit the hyperbolic nature. Addressing the above challenges, in this work, we propose DeepHGCN, the first deep multi-layer HGCN architecture with dramatically improved computational efficiency and substantially alleviated over-smoothing effect. DeepHGCN presents two key enablers of deep HGCNs: (1) a novel hyperbolic feature transformation layer that enables fast and accurate linear maps; and (2) Techniques such as hyperbolic residual connections and regularization for both weights and features facilitated by an efficient hyperbolic midpoint method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeepHGCN obtains significant improvements in link prediction and node classification tasks compared to both Euclidean and shallow hyperbolic GCN variants.

Existing approaches to algorithmic fairness aim to ensure equitable outcomes if human decision-makers comply perfectly with algorithmic decisions. However, perfect compliance with the algorithm is rarely a reality or even a desirable outcome in human-AI collaboration. Yet, recent studies have shown that selective compliance with fair algorithms can amplify discrimination relative to the prior human policy. As a consequence, ensuring equitable outcomes requires fundamentally different algorithmic design principles that ensure robustness to the decision-maker's (a priori unknown) compliance pattern. We define the notion of compliance-robustly fair algorithmic recommendations that are guaranteed to (weakly) improve fairness in decisions, regardless of the human's compliance pattern. We propose a simple optimization strategy to identify the best performance-improving compliance-robustly fair policy. However, we show that it may be infeasible to design algorithmic recommendations that are simultaneously fair in isolation, compliance-robustly fair, and more accurate than the human policy; thus, if our goal is to improve the equity and accuracy of human-AI collaboration, it may not be desirable to enforce traditional fairness constraints.  ( 2 min )

Deep neural network (DNN) models have become increasingly crucial components in intelligent software systems. However, training a DNN model is typically expensive in terms of both time and money. To address this issue, researchers have recently focused on reusing existing DNN models - borrowing the idea of code reuse in software engineering. However, reusing an entire model could cause extra overhead or inherits the weakness from the undesired functionalities. Hence, existing work proposes to decompose an already trained model into modules, i.e., modularizing-after-training, and enable module reuse. Since trained models are not built for modularization, modularizing-after-training incurs huge overhead and model accuracy loss. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that incorporates modularization into the model training process, i.e., modularizing-while-training (MwT). We train a model to be structurally modular through two loss functions that optimize intra-module cohesion and inter-module coupling. We have implemented the proposed approach for modularizing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models in this work. The evaluation results on representative models demonstrate that MwT outperforms the state-of-the-art approach. Specifically, the accuracy loss caused by MwT is only 1.13 percentage points, which is 1.76 percentage points less than that of the baseline. The kernel retention rate of the modules generated by MwT is only 14.58%, with a reduction of 74.31% over the state-of-the-art approach. Furthermore, the total time cost required for training and modularizing is only 108 minutes, half of the baseline.

In breast surgical planning, accurate registration of MR images across patient positions has the potential to improve the localisation of tumours during breast cancer treatment. While learning-based registration methods have recently become the state-of-the-art approach for most medical image registration tasks, these methods have yet to make inroads into breast image registration due to certain difficulties-the lack of rich texture information in breast MR images and the need for the deformations to be diffeomophic. In this work, we propose learning strategies for breast MR image registration that are amenable to diffeomorphic constraints, together with early experimental results from in-silico and in-vivo experiments. One key contribution of this work is a registration network which produces superior registration outcomes for breast images in addition to providing diffeomorphic guarantees.

Gait analysis leverages unique walking patterns for person identification and assessment across multiple domains. Among the methods used for gait analysis, skeleton-based approaches have shown promise due to their robust and interpretable features. However, these methods often rely on hand-crafted spatial-temporal graphs that are based on human anatomy disregarding the particularities of the dataset and task. This paper proposes a novel method to simplify the spatial-temporal graph representation for gait-based gender estimation, improving interpretability without losing performance. Our approach employs two models, an upstream and a downstream model, that can adjust the adjacency matrix for each walking instance, thereby removing the fixed nature of the graph. By employing the Straight-Through Gumbel-Softmax trick, our model is trainable end-to-end. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the CASIA-B dataset for gait-based gender estimation. The resulting graphs are interpretable and differ qualitatively from fixed graphs used in existing models. Our research contributes to enhancing the explainability and task-specific adaptability of gait recognition, promoting more efficient and reliable gait-based biometrics.

Federated learning (FL) offers privacy-preserving decentralized machine learning, optimizing models at edge clients without sharing private data. Simultaneously, foundation models (FMs) have gained traction in the artificial intelligence (AI) community due to their exceptional performance across various tasks. However, integrating FMs into FL presents challenges, primarily due to their substantial size and intensive resource requirements. This is especially true when considering the resource heterogeneity in edge FL systems. We present an adaptive framework for Resource-aware Federated Foundation Models (RaFFM) to address these challenges. RaFFM introduces specialized model compression algorithms tailored for FL scenarios, such as salient parameter prioritization and high-performance subnetwork extraction. These algorithms enable dynamic scaling of given transformer-based FMs to fit heterogeneous resource constraints at the network edge during both FL's optimization and deployment stages. Experimental results demonstrate that RaFFM shows significant superiority in resource utilization efficiency and uses fewer resources to deploy FMs to FL. Despite the lower resource consumption, target models optimized by RaFFM achieve performance on par with traditional FL methods applied to full-sized FMs. This is evident across tasks in both natural language processing and computer vision domains.

When artificial neural networks have demonstrated exceptional practical success in a variety of domains, investigations into their theoretical characteristics, such as their approximation power, statistical properties, and generalization performance, have concurrently made significant strides. In this paper, we construct a novel theory for understanding the effectiveness of neural networks, which offers a perspective distinct from prior research. Specifically, we explore the rationale underlying a common practice during the construction of neural network models: sample splitting. Our findings indicate that the optimal hyperparameters derived from sample splitting can enable a neural network model that asymptotically minimizes the prediction risk. We conduct extensive experiments across different application scenarios and network architectures, and the results manifest our theory's effectiveness.

Automated game design (AGD), the study of automatically generating game rules, has a long history in technical games research. AGD approaches generally rely on approximations of human play, either objective functions or AI agents. Despite this, the majority of these approximators are static, meaning they do not reflect human player's ability to learn and improve in a game. In this paper, we investigate the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) as an approximator for human play for rule generation. We recreate the classic AGD environment Mechanic Maker in Unity as a new, open-source rule generation framework. Our results demonstrate that RL produces distinct sets of rules from an A* agent baseline, which may be more usable by humans.

By reducing the curvature of the loss surface in the parameter space, Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) yields widespread robustness improvement under domain transfer. Instead of focusing on parameters, however, this work considers the transferability of representations as the optimization target for out-of-domain generalization in a fine-tuning setup. To encourage the retention of transferable representations, we consider trust region-based fine-tuning methods, which exploit task-specific skills without forgetting task-agnostic representations from pre-training. We unify parameter- and representation-space smoothing approaches by using trust region bounds to inform SAM-style regularizers on both of these optimization surfaces. We propose Trust Region Aware Minimization (TRAM), a fine-tuning algorithm that optimizes for flat minima and smooth, informative representations without forgetting pre-trained structure. We find that TRAM outperforms both sharpness-aware and trust region-based optimization methods on cross-domain language modeling and cross-lingual transfer, where robustness to domain transfer and representation generality are critical for success. TRAM establishes a new standard in training generalizable models with minimal additional computation.

Scientific discovery and engineering design are currently limited by the time and cost of physical experiments, selected mostly through trial-and-error and intuition that require deep domain expertise. Numerical simulations present an alternative to physical experiments but are usually infeasible for complex real-world domains due to the computational requirements of existing numerical methods. Artificial intelligence (AI) presents a potential paradigm shift by developing fast data-driven surrogate models. In particular, an AI framework, known as neural operators, presents a principled framework for learning mappings between functions defined on continuous domains, e.g., spatiotemporal processes and partial differential equations (PDE). They can extrapolate and predict solutions at new locations unseen during training, i.e., perform zero-shot super-resolution. Neural operators can augment or even replace existing simulators in many applications, such as computational fluid dynamics, weather forecasting, and material modeling, while being 4-5 orders of magnitude faster. Further, neural operators can be integrated with physics and other domain constraints enforced at finer resolutions to obtain high-fidelity solutions and good generalization. Since neural operators are differentiable, they can directly optimize parameters for inverse design and other inverse problems. We believe that neural operators present a transformative approach to simulation and design, enabling rapid research and development.

Multi-object representation learning aims to represent complex real-world visual input using the composition of multiple objects. Representation learning methods have often used unsupervised learning to segment an input image into individual objects and encode these objects into each latent vector. However, it is not clear how previous methods have achieved the appropriate segmentation of individual objects. Additionally, most of the previous methods regularize the latent vectors using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Therefore, it is not clear whether VAE regularization contributes to appropriate object segmentation. To elucidate the mechanism of object segmentation in multi-object representation learning, we conducted an ablation study on MONet, which is a typical method. MONet represents multiple objects using pairs that consist of an attention mask and the latent vector corresponding to the attention mask. Each latent vector is encoded from the input image and attention mask. Then, the component image and attention mask are decoded from each latent vector. The loss function of MONet consists of 1) the sum of reconstruction losses between the input image and decoded component image, 2) the VAE regularization loss of the latent vector, and 3) the reconstruction loss of the attention mask to explicitly encode shape information. We conducted an ablation study on these three loss functions to investigate the effect on segmentation performance. Our results showed that the VAE regularization loss did not affect segmentation performance and the others losses did affect it. Based on this result, we hypothesize that it is important to maximize the attention mask of the image region best represented by a single latent vector corresponding to the attention mask. We confirmed this hypothesis by evaluating a new loss function with the same mechanism as the hypothesis.

One of the goals in Federated Learning (FL) is to create personalized models that can adapt to the context of each participating client, while utilizing knowledge from a shared global model. Yet, often, personalization requires a fine-tuning step using clients' labeled data in order to achieve good performance. This may not be feasible in scenarios where incoming clients are fresh and/or have privacy concerns. It, then, remains open how one can achieve just-in-time personalization in these scenarios. We propose FedJETs, a novel solution by using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework within a FL setup. Our method leverages the diversity of the clients to train specialized experts on different subsets of classes, and a gating function to route the input to the most relevant expert(s). Our gating function harnesses the knowledge of a pretrained model common expert to enhance its routing decisions on-the-fly. As a highlight, our approach can improve accuracy up to 18\% in state of the art FL settings, while maintaining competitive zero-shot performance. In practice, our method can handle non-homogeneous data distributions, scale more efficiently, and improve the state-of-the-art performance on common FL benchmarks.

Foundation models (FMs) are able to leverage large volumes of unlabeled data to demonstrate superior performance across a wide range of tasks. However, FMs developed for biomedical domains have largely remained unimodal, i.e., independently trained and used for tasks on protein sequences alone, small molecule structures alone, or clinical data alone. To overcome this limitation of biomedical FMs, we present BioBridge, a novel parameter-efficient learning framework, to bridge independently trained unimodal FMs to establish multimodal behavior. BioBridge achieves it by utilizing Knowledge Graphs (KG) to learn transformations between one unimodal FM and another without fine-tuning any underlying unimodal FMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that BioBridge can beat the best baseline KG embedding methods (on average by around 76.3%) in cross-modal retrieval tasks. We also identify BioBridge demonstrates out-of-domain generalization ability by extrapolating to unseen modalities or relations. Additionally, we also show that BioBridge presents itself as a general purpose retriever that can aid biomedical multimodal question answering as well as enhance the guided generation of novel drugs.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for 3D scene representation and rendering. These data-driven models can learn to synthesize high-quality images from sparse 2D observations, enabling realistic and interactive scene reconstructions. However, the growing usage of NeRFs in critical applications such as augmented reality, robotics, and virtual environments could be threatened by adversarial attacks. In this paper we present how generalizable NeRFs can be attacked by both low-intensity adversarial attacks and adversarial patches, where the later could be robust enough to be used in real world applications. We also demonstrate targeted attacks, where a specific, predefined output scene is generated by these attack with success.

Deep learning methods have been successfully used in various computer vision tasks. Inspired by that success, deep learning has been explored in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction. In particular, integrating deep learning and model-based optimization methods has shown considerable advantages. However, a large amount of labeled training data is typically needed for high reconstruction quality, which is challenging for some MRI applications. In this paper, we propose a novel reconstruction method, named DURED-Net, that enables interpretable self-supervised learning for MR image reconstruction by combining a self-supervised denoising network and a plug-and-play method. We aim to boost the reconstruction performance of Noise2Noise in MR reconstruction by adding an explicit prior that utilizes imaging physics. Specifically, the leverage of a denoising network for MRI reconstruction is achieved using Regularization by Denoising (RED). Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method requires a reduced amount of training data to achieve high reconstruction quality among the state-of-art of MR reconstruction utilizing the Noise2Noise method.

Deep learning models based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) have been widely used to diagnose brain diseases, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Existing studies have leveraged the functional connectivity (FC) of rs-fMRI, achieving notable classification performance. However, they have significant limitations, including the lack of adequate information while using linear low-order FC as inputs to the model, not considering individual characteristics (i.e., different symptoms or varying stages of severity) among patients with ASD, and the non-explainability of the decision process. To cover these limitations, we propose a novel explainability-guided region of interest (ROI) selection (EAG-RS) framework that identifies non-linear high-order functional associations among brain regions by leveraging an explainable artificial intelligence technique and selects class-discriminative regions for brain disease identification. The proposed framework includes three steps: (i) inter-regional relation learning to estimate non-linear relations through random seed-based network masking, (ii) explainable connection-wise relevance score estimation to explore high-order relations between functional connections, and (iii) non-linear high-order FC-based diagnosis-informative ROI selection and classifier learning to identify ASD. We validated the effectiveness of our proposed method by conducting experiments using the Autism Brain Imaging Database Exchange (ABIDE) dataset, demonstrating that the proposed method outperforms other comparative methods in terms of various evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we qualitatively analyzed the selected ROIs and identified ASD subtypes linked to previous neuroscientific studies.

In previous literature, backward error analysis was used to find ordinary differential equations (ODEs) approximating the gradient descent trajectory. It was found that finite step sizes implicitly regularize solutions because terms appearing in the ODEs penalize the two-norm of the loss gradients. We prove that the existence of similar implicit regularization in RMSProp and Adam depends on their hyperparameters and the training stage, but with a different "norm" involved: the corresponding ODE terms either penalize the (perturbed) one-norm of the loss gradients or, on the contrary, hinder its decrease (the latter case being typical). We also conduct numerical experiments and discuss how the proven facts can influence generalization.

Booming deep learning has substantially improved the diagnosis for diverse lesions in ultrasound images, but a conspicuous research gap concerning cervical lymph node lesions still remains. The objective of this work is to diagnose cervical lymph node lesions in ultrasound images by leveraging a deep learning model. To this end, we first collected 3392 cervical ultrasound images containing normal lymph nodes, benign lymph node lesions, malignant primary lymph node lesions, and malignant metastatic lymph node lesions. Given that ultrasound images are generated by the reflection and scattering of sound waves across varied bodily tissues, we proposed the Conv-FFT Block. It integrates convolutional operations with the fast Fourier transform to more astutely model the images. Building upon this foundation, we designed a novel architecture, named SFUSNet. SFUSNet not only discerns variances in ultrasound images from the spatial domain but also adeptly captures micro-structural alterations across various lesions in the frequency domain. To ascertain the potential of SFUSNet, we benchmarked it against 12 popular architectures through five-fold cross-validation. The results show that SFUSNet is the state-of-the-art model and can achieve 92.89% accuracy. Moreover, its average precision, average sensitivity and average specificity for four types of lesions achieve 90.46%, 89.95% and 97.49%, respectively.

We introduce a method to improve the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models on general language understanding tasks. Specifically, we build an autonomous agent to instruct the reasoning process of large language models. We show this approach further unleashes the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models to more tasks. We study the performance of our method on a wide set of datasets spanning generation, classification, and reasoning. We show that our method generalizes to most tasks and obtains state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 20 of the 29 datasets that we evaluate. For instance, our method boosts the performance of state-of-the-art large language models by a large margin, including Vicuna-13b (13.3%), Llama-2-70b-chat (23.2%), and GPT-3.5 Turbo (17.0%). Compared to zero-shot chain of thought, our improvement in reasoning is striking, with an average increase of 10.5%. With our method, Llama-2-70b-chat outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 Turbo by 10.2%.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various evaluation benchmarks. However, concerns about their performance are raised on potential data contamination in their considerable volume of training corpus. Moreover, the static nature and fixed complexity of current benchmarks may inadequately gauge the advancing capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce DyVal, a novel, general, and flexible evaluation protocol for dynamic evaluation of LLMs. Based on our proposed dynamic evaluation framework, we build graph-informed DyVal by leveraging the structural advantage of directed acyclic graphs to dynamically generate evaluation samples with controllable complexities. DyVal generates challenging evaluation sets on reasoning tasks including mathematics, logical reasoning, and algorithm problems. We evaluate various LLMs ranging from Flan-T5-large to ChatGPT and GPT4. Experiments demonstrate that LLMs perform worse in DyVal-generated evaluation samples with different complexities, emphasizing the significance of dynamic evaluation. We also analyze the failure cases and results of different prompting methods. Moreover, DyVal-generated samples are not only evaluation sets, but also helpful data for fine-tuning to improve the performance of LLMs on existing benchmarks. We hope that DyVal can shed light on the future evaluation research of LLMs.

We study the distribution of a fully connected neural network with random Gaussian weights and biases in which the hidden layer widths are proportional to a large constant $n$. Under mild assumptions on the non-linearity, we obtain quantitative bounds on normal approximations valid at large but finite $n$ and any fixed network depth. Our theorems show both for the finite-dimensional distributions and the entire process, that the distance between a random fully connected network (and its derivatives) to the corresponding infinite width Gaussian process scales like $n^{-\gamma}$ for $\gamma>0$, with the exponent depending on the metric used to measure discrepancy. Our bounds are strictly stronger in terms of their dependence on network width than any previously available in the literature; in the one-dimensional case, we also prove that they are optimal, i.e., we establish matching lower bounds.

Music datasets play a crucial role in advancing research in machine learning for music. However, existing music datasets suffer from limited size, accessibility, and lack of audio resources. To address these shortcomings, we present DISCO-10M, a novel and extensive music dataset that surpasses the largest previously available music dataset by an order of magnitude. To ensure high-quality data, we implement a multi-stage filtering process. This process incorporates similarities based on textual descriptions and audio embeddings. Moreover, we provide precomputed CLAP embeddings alongside DISCO-10M, facilitating direct application on various downstream tasks. These embeddings enable efficient exploration of machine learning applications on the provided data. With DISCO-10M, we aim to democratize and facilitate new research to help advance the development of novel machine learning models for music.

The recent progress in large language models (LLMs), especially the invention of chain-of-thought prompting, has made it possible to automatically answer questions by stepwise reasoning. However, when faced with more complicated problems that require non-linear thinking, even the strongest LLMs make mistakes. To address this, we explore whether LLMs are able to recognize errors in their own step-by-step reasoning, without resorting to external resources. To this end, we propose SelfCheck, a general-purpose zero-shot verification schema for recognizing such errors. We then use the results of these checks to improve question-answering performance by conducting weighted voting on multiple solutions to the question. We test SelfCheck on three datasets (GSM8K, MathQA, and MATH) and find that it successfully recognizes errors and, in turn, increases final answer accuracies.

The minimax problems arise throughout machine learning applications, ranging from adversarial training and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning to AUROC maximization. To address the large-scale data challenges across multiple clients with communication-efficient distributed training, federated learning (FL) is gaining popularity. Many optimization algorithms for minimax problems have been developed in the centralized setting (\emph{i.e.} single-machine). Nonetheless, the algorithm for minimax problems under FL is still underexplored. In this paper, we study a class of federated nonconvex minimax optimization problems. We propose FL algorithms (FedSGDA+ and FedSGDA-M) and reduce existing complexity results for the most common minimax problems. For nonconvex-concave problems, we propose FedSGDA+ and reduce the communication complexity to $O(\varepsilon^{-6})$. Under nonconvex-strongly-concave and nonconvex-PL minimax settings, we prove that FedSGDA-M has the best-known sample complexity of $O(\kappa^{3} N^{-1}\varepsilon^{-3})$ and the best-known communication complexity of $O(\kappa^{2}\varepsilon^{-2})$. FedSGDA-M is the first algorithm to match the best sample complexity $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ achieved by the single-machine method under the nonconvex-strongly-concave setting. Extensive experimental results on fair classification and AUROC maximization show the efficiency of our algorithms.

Given a set of $K$ probability densities, we consider the multimarginal generative modeling problem of learning a joint distribution that recovers these densities as marginals. The structure of this joint distribution should identify multi-way correspondences among the prescribed marginals. We formalize an approach to this task within a generalization of the stochastic interpolant framework, leading to efficient learning algorithms built upon dynamical transport of measure. Our generative models are defined by velocity and score fields that can be characterized as the minimizers of simple quadratic objectives, and they are defined on a simplex that generalizes the time variable in the usual dynamical transport framework. The resulting transport on the simplex is influenced by all marginals, and we show that multi-way correspondences can be extracted. The identification of such correspondences has applications to style transfer, algorithmic fairness, and data decorruption. In addition, the multimarginal perspective enables an efficient algorithm for reducing the dynamical transport cost in the ordinary two-marginal setting. We demonstrate these capacities with several numerical examples.

In this paper, we introduce a new heuristics for global optimization in scenarios where extensive evaluations of the cost function are expensive, inaccessible, or even prohibitive. The method, which we call Landscape-Sketch-and-Step (LSS), combines Machine Learning, Stochastic Optimization, and Reinforcement Learning techniques, relying on historical information from previously sampled points to make judicious choices of parameter values where the cost function should be evaluated at. Unlike optimization by Replica Exchange Monte Carlo methods, the number of evaluations of the cost function required in this approach is comparable to that used by Simulated Annealing, quality that is especially important in contexts like high-throughput computing or high-performance computing tasks, where evaluations are either computationally expensive or take a long time to be performed. The method also differs from standard Surrogate Optimization techniques, for it does not construct a surrogate model that aims at approximating or reconstructing the objective function. We illustrate our method by applying it to low dimensional optimization problems (dimensions 1, 2, 4, and 8) that mimick known difficulties of minimization on rugged energy landscapes often seen in Condensed Matter Physics, where cost functions are rugged and plagued with local minima. When compared to classical Simulated Annealing, the LSS shows an effective acceleration of the optimization process.

Objective: Semantic indexing of biomedical literature is usually done at the level of MeSH descriptors with several related but distinct biomedical concepts often grouped together and treated as a single topic. This study proposes a new method for the automated refinement of subject annotations at the level of MeSH concepts. Methods: Lacking labelled data, we rely on weak supervision based on concept occurrence in the abstract of an article, which is also enhanced by dictionary-based heuristics. In addition, we investigate deep learning approaches, making design choices to tackle the particular challenges of this task. The new method is evaluated on a large-scale retrospective scenario, based on concepts that have been promoted to descriptors. Results: In our experiments concept occurrence was the strongest heuristic achieving a macro-F1 score of about 0.63 across several labels. The proposed method improved it further by more than 4pp. Conclusion: The results suggest that concept occurrence is a strong heuristic for refining the coarse-grained labels at the level of MeSH concepts and the proposed method improves it further.

Despite their promise to facilitate new scientific discoveries, the opaqueness of neural networks presents a challenge in interpreting the logic behind their findings. Here, we use a eXplainable-AI (XAI) technique called $inception$ or $deep$ $dreaming$, which has been invented in machine learning for computer vision. We use this technique to explore what neural networks learn about quantum optics experiments. Our story begins by training deep neural networks on the properties of quantum systems. Once trained, we "invert" the neural network -- effectively asking how it imagines a quantum system with a specific property, and how it would continuously modify the quantum system to change a property. We find that the network can shift the initial distribution of properties of the quantum system, and we can conceptualize the learned strategies of the neural network. Interestingly, we find that, in the first layers, the neural network identifies simple properties, while in the deeper ones, it can identify complex quantum structures and even quantum entanglement. This is in reminiscence of long-understood properties known in computer vision, which we now identify in a complex natural science task. Our approach could be useful in a more interpretable way to develop new advanced AI-based scientific discovery techniques in quantum physics.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically sample-inefficient, making it challenging to train and deploy RL-policies in real world robots. Even a robust policy trained in simulation requires a real-world deployment to assess their performance. This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the real-world performance of agent policies prior to deploying them in the real world. Our approach incorporates a simulator along with real-world offline data to evaluate the performance of any policy using the framework of Marginalized Importance Sampling (MIS). Existing MIS methods face two challenges: (1) large density ratios that deviate from a reasonable range and (2) indirect supervision, where the ratio needs to be inferred indirectly, thus exacerbating estimation error. Our approach addresses these challenges by introducing the target policy's occupancy in the simulator as an intermediate variable and learning the density ratio as the product of two terms that can be learned separately. The first term is learned with direct supervision and the second term has a small magnitude, thus making it computationally efficient. We analyze the sample complexity as well as error propagation of our two step-procedure. Furthermore, we empirically evaluate our approach on Sim2Sim environments such as Cartpole, Reacher, and Half-Cheetah. Our results show that our method generalizes well across a variety of Sim2Sim gap, target policies and offline data collection policies. We also demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on a Sim2Real task of validating the performance of a 7 DoF robotic arm using offline data along with the Gazebo simulator.

Like generic multi-task learning, continual learning has the nature of multi-objective optimization, and therefore faces a trade-off between the performance of different tasks. That is, to optimize for the current task distribution, it may need to compromise performance on some previous tasks. This means that there exist multiple models that are Pareto-optimal at different times, each addressing a distinct task performance trade-off. Researchers have discussed how to train particular models to address specific trade-off preferences. However, existing algorithms require training overheads proportional to the number of preferences -- a large burden when there are multiple, possibly infinitely many, preferences. As a response, we propose Imprecise Bayesian Continual Learning (IBCL). Upon a new task, IBCL (1) updates a knowledge base in the form of a convex hull of model parameter distributions and (2) obtains particular models to address task trade-off preferences with zero-shot. That is, IBCL does not require any additional training overhead to generate preference-addressing models from its knowledge base. We show that models obtained by IBCL have guarantees in identifying the Pareto optimal parameters. Moreover, experiments on standard image classification and NLP tasks support this guarantee. Statistically, IBCL improves average per-task accuracy by at most 23\% and peak per-task accuracy by at most 15\% with respect to the baseline methods, with steadily near-zero or positive backward transfer. Most importantly, IBCL significantly reduces the training overhead from training 1 model per preference to at most 3 models for all preferences.

Many believe that Large Language Models (LLMs) open the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some see opportunities while others see dangers. Yet both proponents and opponents grasp AI through the imagery popularised by science fiction. Will the machine become sentient and rebel against its creators? Will we experience a paperclip apocalypse? Before answering such questions, we should first ask whether this mental imagery provides a good description of the phenomenon at hand. Understanding weather patterns through the moods of the gods only goes so far. The present paper instead advocates understanding LLMs and their connection to AI through the imagery of Jorge Luis Borges, a master of 20th century literature, forerunner of magical realism, and precursor to postmodern literature. This exercise leads to a new perspective that illuminates the relation between language modelling and artificial intelligence.

We present a novel defense, against backdoor attacks on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), wherein adversaries covertly implant malicious behaviors (backdoors) into DNNs. Our defense falls within the category of post-development defenses that operate independently of how the model was generated. The proposed defense is built upon a novel reverse engineering approach that can directly extract backdoor functionality of a given backdoored model to a backdoor expert model. The approach is straightforward -- finetuning the backdoored model over a small set of intentionally mislabeled clean samples, such that it unlearns the normal functionality while still preserving the backdoor functionality, and thus resulting in a model (dubbed a backdoor expert model) that can only recognize backdoor inputs. Based on the extracted backdoor expert model, we show the feasibility of devising highly accurate backdoor input detectors that filter out the backdoor inputs during model inference. Further augmented by an ensemble strategy with a finetuned auxiliary model, our defense, BaDExpert (Backdoor Input Detection with Backdoor Expert), effectively mitigates 17 SOTA backdoor attacks while minimally impacting clean utility. The effectiveness of BaDExpert has been verified on multiple datasets (CIFAR10, GTSRB and ImageNet) across various model architectures (ResNet, VGG, MobileNetV2 and Vision Transformer).

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly being used as controllers in reactive systems. However, DNNs are highly opaque, which renders it difficult to explain and justify their actions. To mitigate this issue, there has been a surge of interest in explainable AI (XAI) techniques, capable of pinpointing the input features that caused the DNN to act as it did. Existing XAI techniques typically face two limitations: (i) they are heuristic, and do not provide formal guarantees that the explanations are correct; and (ii) they often apply to ``one-shot'' systems, where the DNN is invoked independently of past invocations, as opposed to reactive systems. Here, we begin bridging this gap, and propose a formal DNN-verification-based XAI technique for reasoning about multi-step, reactive systems. We suggest methods for efficiently calculating succinct explanations, by exploiting the system's transition constraints in order to curtail the search space explored by the underlying verifier. We evaluate our approach on two popular benchmarks from the domain of automated navigation; and observe that our methods allow the efficient computation of minimal and minimum explanations, significantly outperforming the state of the art. We also demonstrate that our methods produce formal explanations that are more reliable than competing, non-verification-based XAI techniques.

Message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) emerged as powerful tools for processing graph-structured input. However, they operate on a fixed input graph structure, ignoring potential noise and missing information. Furthermore, their local aggregation mechanism can lead to problems such as over-squashing and limited expressive power in capturing relevant graph structures. Existing solutions to these challenges have primarily relied on heuristic methods, often disregarding the underlying data distribution. Hence, devising principled approaches for learning to infer graph structures relevant to the given prediction task remains an open challenge. In this work, leveraging recent progress in exact and differentiable $k$-subset sampling, we devise probabilistically rewired MPNNs (PR-MPNNs), which learn to add relevant edges while omitting less beneficial ones. For the first time, our theoretical analysis explores how PR-MPNNs enhance expressive power, and we identify precise conditions under which they outperform purely randomized approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates issues like over-squashing and under-reaching. In addition, on established real-world datasets, our method exhibits competitive or superior predictive performance compared to traditional MPNN models and recent graph transformer architectures.

Learning from crowds describes that the annotations of training data are obtained with crowd-sourcing services. Multiple annotators each complete their own small part of the annotations, where labeling mistakes that depend on annotators occur frequently. Modeling the label-noise generation process by the noise transition matrix is a power tool to tackle the label noise. In real-world crowd-sourcing scenarios, noise transition matrices are both annotator- and instance-dependent. However, due to the high complexity of annotator- and instance-dependent transition matrices (AIDTM), annotation sparsity, which means each annotator only labels a little part of instances, makes modeling AIDTM very challenging. Prior works simplify the problem by assuming the transition matrix is instance-independent or using simple parametric ways, which lose modeling generality. Motivated by this, we target a more realistic problem, estimating general AIDTM in practice. Without losing modeling generality, we parameterize AIDTM with deep neural networks. To alleviate the modeling challenge, we suppose every annotator shares its noise pattern with similar annotators, and estimate AIDTM via knowledge transfer. We hence first model the mixture of noise patterns by all annotators, and then transfer this modeling to individual annotators. Furthermore, considering that the transfer from the mixture of noise patterns to individuals may cause two annotators with highly different noise generations to perturb each other, we employ the knowledge transfer between identified neighboring annotators to calibrate the modeling. Theoretical analyses are derived to demonstrate that both the knowledge transfer from global to individuals and the knowledge transfer between neighboring individuals can help model general AIDTM. Experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed approach on synthetic and real-world crowd-sourcing data.

Toward robust malware detection, we explore the attack surface of existing malware detection systems. We conduct root-cause analyses of the practical binary-level black-box adversarial malware examples. Additionally, we uncover the sensitivity of volatile features within the detection engines and exhibit their exploitability. Highlighting volatile information channels within the software, we introduce three software pre-processing steps to eliminate the attack surface, namely, padding removal, software stripping, and inter-section information resetting. Further, to counter the emerging section injection attacks, we propose a graph-based section-dependent information extraction scheme for software representation. The proposed scheme leverages aggregated information within various sections in the software to enable robust malware detection and mitigate adversarial settings. Our experimental results show that traditional malware detection models are ineffective against adversarial threats. However, the attack surface can be largely reduced by eliminating the volatile information. Therefore, we propose simple-yet-effective methods to mitigate the impacts of binary manipulation attacks. Overall, our graph-based malware detection scheme can accurately detect malware with an area under the curve score of 88.32\% and a score of 88.19% under a combination of binary manipulation attacks, exhibiting the efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Fluid dynamics computations for tube-like geometries are important for biomedical evaluation of vascular and airway fluid dynamics. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have recently emerged as a good alternative to traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. The vanilla PINN, however, requires much longer training time than the traditional CFD methods for each specific flow scenario and thus does not justify its mainstream use. Here, we explore the use of the multi-case PINN approach for calculating biomedical tube flows, where varied geometry cases are parameterized and pre-trained on the PINN, such that results for unseen geometries can be obtained in real time. Our objective is to identify network architecture, tube-specific, and regularization strategies that can optimize this, via experiments on a series of idealized 2D stenotic tube flows.

Graph-level anomaly detection has gained significant attention as it finds many applications in various domains, such as cancer diagnosis and enzyme prediction. However, existing methods fail to capture the underlying properties of graph anomalies, resulting in unexplainable framework design and unsatisfying performance. In this paper, we take a step back and re-investigate the spectral differences between anomalous and normal graphs. Our main observation shows a significant disparity in the accumulated spectral energy between these two classes. Moreover, we prove that the accumulated spectral energy of the graph signal can be represented by its Rayleigh Quotient, indicating that the Rayleigh Quotient is a driving factor behind the anomalous properties of graphs. Motivated by this, we propose Rayleigh Quotient Graph Neural Network (RQGNN), the first spectral GNN for graph-level anomaly detection, providing a new perspective on exploring the inherent spectral features of anomalous graphs. Specifically, we introduce a novel framework that consists of two components: the Rayleigh Quotient learning component (RQL) and Chebyshev Wavelet GNN with RQ-pooling (CWGNN-RQ). RQL explicitly captures the Rayleigh Quotient of graphs and CWGNN-RQ implicitly explores the spectral space of graphs. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets show that RQGNN outperforms the best rival by 6.74% in Macro-F1 score and 1.44% in AUC, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.

While significant progress has been made on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), a comprehensive comparison of these methods across a wide range of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is still lacking. This study introduces PINNacle, a benchmarking tool designed to fill this gap. PINNacle provides a diverse dataset, comprising over 20 distinct PDEs from various domains, including heat conduction, fluid dynamics, biology, and electromagnetics. These PDEs encapsulate key challenges inherent to real-world problems, such as complex geometry, multi-scale phenomena, nonlinearity, and high dimensionality. PINNacle also offers a user-friendly toolbox, incorporating about 10 state-of-the-art PINN methods for systematic evaluation and comparison. We have conducted extensive experiments with these methods, offering insights into their strengths and weaknesses. In addition to providing a standardized means of assessing performance, PINNacle also offers an in-depth analysis to guide future research, particularly in areas such as domain decomposition methods and loss reweighting for handling multi-scale problems and complex geometry. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest benchmark with a diverse and comprehensive evaluation that will undoubtedly foster further research in PINNs.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) and Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML) have been used in prior work for generating levels in various games. This paper introduces Content Augmentation and focuses on the subproblem of level inpainting, which involves reconstructing and extending video game levels. Drawing inspiration from image inpainting, we adapt two techniques from this domain to address our specific use case. We present two approaches for level inpainting: an Autoencoder and a U-net. Through a comprehensive case study, we demonstrate their superior performance compared to a baseline method and discuss their relative merits. Furthermore, we provide a practical demonstration of both approaches for the level inpainting task and offer insights into potential directions for future research.

Sampling a target probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental challenge in computational science and engineering. Recent work shows that algorithms derived by considering gradient flows in the space of probability measures open up new avenues for algorithm development. This paper makes three contributions to this sampling approach by scrutinizing the design components of such gradient flows. Any instantiation of a gradient flow for sampling needs an energy functional and a metric to determine the flow, as well as numerical approximations of the flow to derive algorithms. Our first contribution is to show that the Kullback-Leibler divergence, as an energy functional, has the unique property (among all f-divergences) that gradient flows resulting from it do not depend on the normalization constant of the target distribution. Our second contribution is to study the choice of metric from the perspective of invariance. The Fisher-Rao metric is known as the unique choice (up to scaling) that is diffeomorphism invariant. As a computationally tractable alternative, we introduce a relaxed, affine invariance property for the metrics and gradient flows. In particular, we construct various affine invariant Wasserstein and Stein gradient flows. Affine invariant gradient flows are shown to behave more favorably than their non-affine-invariant counterparts when sampling highly anisotropic distributions, in theory and by using particle methods. Our third contribution is to study, and develop efficient algorithms based on Gaussian approximations of the gradient flows; this leads to an alternative to particle methods. We establish connections between various Gaussian approximate gradient flows, discuss their relation to gradient methods arising from parametric variational inference, and study their convergence properties both theoretically and numerically.

A myriad of approaches have been proposed to characterise the mesoscale structure of networks - most often as a partition based on patterns variously called communities, blocks, or clusters. Clearly, distinct methods designed to detect different types of patterns may provide a variety of answers to the network's mesoscale structure. Yet, even multiple runs of a given method can sometimes yield diverse and conflicting results, producing entire landscapes of partitions which potentially include multiple (locally optimal) mesoscale explanations of the network. Such ambiguity motivates a closer look at the ability of these methods to find multiple qualitatively different 'ground truth' partitions in a network. Here, we propose the stochastic cross-block model (SCBM), a generative model which allows for two distinct partitions to be built into the mesoscale structure of a single benchmark network. We demonstrate a use case of the benchmark model by appraising the power of stochastic block models (SBMs) to detect implicitly planted coexisting bi-community and core-periphery structures of different strengths. Given our model design and experimental set-up, we find that the ability to detect the two partitions individually varies by SBM variant and that coexistence of both partitions is recovered only in a very limited number of cases. Our findings suggest that in most instances only one - in some way dominating - structure can be detected, even in the presence of other partitions. They underline the need for considering entire landscapes of partitions when different competing explanations exist and motivate future research to advance partition coexistence detection methods. Our model also contributes to the field of benchmark networks more generally by enabling further exploration of the ability of new and existing methods to detect ambiguity in the mesoscale structure of networks.

Numerical weather forecasting using high-resolution physical models often requires extensive computational resources on supercomputers, which diminishes their wide usage in most real-life applications. As a remedy, applying deep learning methods has revealed innovative solutions within this field. To this end, we introduce a novel deep learning architecture for forecasting high-resolution spatio-temporal weather data. Our approach extends the conventional encoder-decoder structure by integrating Convolutional Long-short Term Memory and Convolutional Neural Networks. In addition, we incorporate attention and context matcher mechanisms into the model architecture. Our Weather Model achieves significant performance improvements compared to baseline deep learning models, including ConvLSTM, TrajGRU, and U-Net. Our experimental evaluation involves high-scale, real-world benchmark numerical weather datasets, namely the ERA5 hourly dataset on pressure levels and WeatherBench. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements in identifying spatial and temporal correlations with attention matrices focusing on distinct parts of the input series to model atmospheric circulations. We also compare our model with high-resolution physical models using the benchmark metrics and show that our Weather Model is accurate and easy to interpret.

Thank you very much for the attention and concern of colleagues and scholars in this work. With the comments and guidance of experts, editors, and reviewers, this work has been accepted for publishing in the journal "Process Safety and Environmental Protection". The theme of this paper relies on the Spatial-temporal associations of numerous variables in the same industrial processes, which refers to numerous variables obtained in dynamic industrial processes with Spatial-temporal correlation characteristics, i.e., these variables are not only highly correlated in time but also interrelated in space. To handle this problem, three key issues need to be well addressed: variable characteristics modeling and representation, graph network construction (temporal information), and graph characteristics perception. The first issue is implemented by assuming the data follows one improved Gaussian distribution, while the graph network can be defined by the monitoring variables and their edges which are calculated by their characteristics in time. Finally, these networks corresponding to process states at different times are fed into a graph convolutional neural network to implement graph classification to achieve process monitoring. A benchmark experiment (Tennessee Eastman chemical process) and one application study (cobalt purification from zinc solution) are employed to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of this paper.

In the 1950s, Barlow and Attneave hypothesised a link between biological vision and information maximisation. Following Shannon, information was defined using the probability of natural images. A number of physiological and psychophysical phenomena have been derived ever since from principles like info-max, efficient coding, or optimal denoising. However, it remains unclear how this link is expressed in mathematical terms from image probability. First, classical derivations were subjected to strong assumptions on the probability models and on the behaviour of the sensors. Moreover, the direct evaluation of the hypothesis was limited by the inability of the classical image models to deliver accurate estimates of the probability. In this work we directly evaluate image probabilities using an advanced generative model for natural images, and we analyse how probability-related factors can be combined to predict human perception via sensitivity of state-of-the-art subjective image quality metrics. We use information theory and regression analysis to find a combination of just two probability-related factors that achieves 0.8 correlation with subjective metrics. This probability-based sensitivity is psychophysically validated by reproducing the basic trends of the Contrast Sensitivity Function, its suprathreshold variation, and trends of the Weber-law and masking.

Evasion Attacks (EA) are used to test the robustness of trained neural networks by distorting input data to misguide the model into incorrect classifications. Creating these attacks is a challenging task, especially with the ever-increasing complexity of models and datasets. In this work, we introduce a self-supervised, computationally economical method for generating adversarial examples, designed for the unseen black-box setting. Adapting techniques from representation learning, our method generates on-manifold EAs that are encouraged to resemble the data distribution. These attacks are comparable in effectiveness compared to the state-of-the-art when attacking the model trained on, but are significantly more effective when attacking unseen models, as the attacks are more related to the data rather than the model itself. Our experiments consistently demonstrate the method is effective across various models, unseen data categories, and even defended models, suggesting a significant role for on-manifold EAs when targeting unseen models.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) trained with Backpropagation (BP) show astounding performance and are increasingly often used in performing our daily life tasks. However, ANNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which alter inputs with small targeted perturbations that drastically disrupt the models' performance. The most effective method to make ANNs robust against these attacks is adversarial training, in which the training dataset is augmented with exemplary adversarial samples. Unfortunately, this approach has the drawback of increased training complexity since generating adversarial samples is very computationally demanding. In contrast to ANNs, humans are not susceptible to adversarial attacks. Therefore, in this work, we investigate whether biologically-plausible learning algorithms are more robust against adversarial attacks than BP. In particular, we present an extensive comparative analysis of the adversarial robustness of BP and Present the Error to Perturb the Input To modulate Activity (PEPITA), a recently proposed biologically-plausible learning algorithm, on various computer vision tasks. We observe that PEPITA has higher intrinsic adversarial robustness and, with adversarial training, has a more favourable natural-vs-adversarial performance trade-off as, for the same natural accuracies, PEPITA's adversarial accuracies decrease in average by 0.26% and BP's by 8.05%.

Finetuned LLMs often exhibit poor uncertainty quantification, manifesting as overconfidence, poor calibration, and unreliable prediction results on test data or out-of-distribution samples. One approach commonly used in vision for alleviating this issue is a deep ensemble, which constructs an ensemble by training the same model multiple times using different random initializations. However, there is a huge challenge to ensembling LLMs: the most effective LLMs are very, very large. Keeping a single LLM in memory is already challenging enough: keeping an ensemble of e.g. 5 LLMs in memory is impossible in many settings. To address these issues, we propose an ensemble approach using Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique. Critically, these low-rank adapters represent a very small number of parameters, orders of magnitude less than the underlying pre-trained model. Thus, it is possible to construct large ensembles of LoRA adapters with almost the same computational overhead as using the original model. We find that LoRA ensembles, applied on its own or on top of pre-existing regularization techniques, gives consistent improvements in predictive accuracy and uncertainty quantification.

Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), synthetic likelihood, and neural posterior estimation (NPE) rely on simulating statistics to infer parameters of intractable likelihood models. However, such methods are known to yield untrustworthy and misleading inference outcomes under model misspecification, thus hindering their widespread applicability. In this work, we propose the first general approach to handle model misspecification that works across different classes of SBI methods. Leveraging the fact that the choice of statistics determines the degree of misspecification in SBI, we introduce a regularized loss function that penalises those statistics that increase the mismatch between the data and the model. Taking NPE and ABC as use cases, we demonstrate the superior performance of our method on high-dimensional time-series models that are artificially misspecified. We also apply our method to real data from the field of radio propagation where the model is known to be misspecified. We show empirically that the method yields robust inference in misspecified scenarios, whilst still being accurate when the model is well-specified.

We study the problem of training a flow-based generative model, parametrized by a two-layer autoencoder, to sample from a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture. We provide a sharp end-to-end analysis of the problem. First, we provide a tight closed-form characterization of the learnt velocity field, when parametrized by a shallow denoising auto-encoder trained on a finite number $n$ of samples from the target distribution. Building on this analysis, we provide a sharp description of the corresponding generative flow, which pushes the base Gaussian density forward to an approximation of the target density. In particular, we provide closed-form formulae for the distance between the mean of the generated mixture and the mean of the target mixture, which we show decays as $\Theta_n(\frac{1}{n})$. Finally, this rate is shown to be in fact Bayes-optimal.

Deep learning technology has developed unprecedentedly in the last decade and has become the primary choice in many application domains. This progress is mainly attributed to a systematic collaboration in which rapidly growing computing resources encourage advanced algorithms to deal with massive data. However, it has gradually become challenging to handle the unlimited growth of data with limited computing power. To this end, diverse approaches are proposed to improve data processing efficiency. Dataset distillation, a dataset reduction method, addresses this problem by synthesizing a small typical dataset from substantial data and has attracted much attention from the deep learning community. Existing dataset distillation methods can be taxonomized into meta-learning and data matching frameworks according to whether they explicitly mimic the performance of target data. Although dataset distillation has shown surprising performance in compressing datasets, there are still several limitations such as distilling high-resolution data or data with complex label spaces. This paper provides a holistic understanding of dataset distillation from multiple aspects, including distillation frameworks and algorithms, factorized dataset distillation, performance comparison, and applications. Finally, we discuss challenges and promising directions to further promote future studies on dataset distillation.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been the driving force behind many of the recent advances in machine learning. However, research has shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples -- input samples that have been perturbed to force DNN-based models to make errors. As a result, Adversarial Machine Learning (AdvML) has gained a lot of attention, and researchers have investigated these vulnerabilities in various settings and modalities. In addition, DNNs have also been found to incorporate embedded bias and often produce unexplainable predictions, which can result in anti-social AI applications. The emergence of new AI technologies that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, increases the risk of producing anti-social applications at scale. AdvML for Social Good (AdvML4G) is an emerging field that repurposes the AdvML bug to invent pro-social applications. Regulators, practitioners, and researchers should collaborate to encourage the development of pro-social applications and hinder the development of anti-social ones. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive review of the emerging field of AdvML4G. This paper encompasses a taxonomy that highlights the emergence of AdvML4G, a discussion of the differences and similarities between AdvML4G and AdvML, a taxonomy covering social good-related concepts and aspects, an exploration of the motivations behind the emergence of AdvML4G at the intersection of ML4G and AdvML, and an extensive summary of the works that utilize AdvML4G as an auxiliary tool for innovating pro-social applications. Finally, we elaborate upon various challenges and open research issues that require significant attention from the research community.

Decoding speech from brain activity is a long-awaited goal in both healthcare and neuroscience. Invasive devices have recently led to major milestones in that regard: deep learning algorithms trained on intracranial recordings now start to decode elementary linguistic features (e.g. letters, words, spectrograms). However, extending this approach to natural speech and non-invasive brain recordings remains a major challenge. Here, we introduce a model trained with contrastive-learning to decode self-supervised representations of perceived speech from the non-invasive recordings of a large cohort of healthy individuals. To evaluate this approach, we curate and integrate four public datasets, encompassing 175 volunteers recorded with magneto- or electro-encephalography (M/EEG), while they listened to short stories and isolated sentences. The results show that our model can identify, from 3 seconds of MEG signals, the corresponding speech segment with up to 41% accuracy out of more than 1,000 distinct possibilities on average across participants, and more than 80% in the very best participants - a performance that allows the decoding of words and phrases absent from the training set. The comparison of our model to a variety of baselines highlights the importance of (i) a contrastive objective, (ii) pretrained representations of speech and (iii) a common convolutional architecture simultaneously trained across multiple participants. Finally, the analysis of the decoder's predictions suggests that they primarily depend on lexical and contextual semantic representations. Overall, this effective decoding of perceived speech from non-invasive recordings delineates a promising path to decode language from brain activity, without putting patients at risk for brain surgery.

We study the task of training regression models with the guarantee of label differential privacy (DP). Based on a global prior distribution on label values, which could be obtained privately, we derive a label DP randomization mechanism that is optimal under a given regression loss function. We prove that the optimal mechanism takes the form of a "randomized response on bins", and propose an efficient algorithm for finding the optimal bin values. We carry out a thorough experimental evaluation on several datasets demonstrating the efficacy of our algorithm.

We present Deep Region Competition (DRC), an algorithm designed to extract foreground objects from images in a fully unsupervised manner. Foreground extraction can be viewed as a special case of generic image segmentation that focuses on identifying and disentangling objects from the background. In this work, we rethink the foreground extraction by reconciling energy-based prior with generative image modeling in the form of Mixture of Experts (MoE), where we further introduce the learned pixel re-assignment as the essential inductive bias to capture the regularities of background regions. With this modeling, the foreground-background partition can be naturally found through Expectation-Maximization (EM). We show that the proposed method effectively exploits the interaction between the mixture components during the partitioning process, which closely connects to region competition, a seminal approach for generic image segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that DRC exhibits more competitive performances on complex real-world data and challenging multi-object scenes compared with prior methods. Moreover, we show empirically that DRC can potentially generalize to novel foreground objects even from categories unseen during training.

In this paper we introduce some new algebraic and geometric perspectives on networked space communications. Our main contribution is a novel definition of a time-varying graph (TVG), defined in terms of a matrix with values in subsets of the real line P(R). We leverage semi-ring properties of P(R) to model multi-hop communication in a TVG using matrix multiplication and a truncated Kleene star. This leads to novel statistics on the communication capacity of TVGs called lifetime curves, which we generate for large samples of randomly chosen STARLINK satellites, whose connectivity is modeled over day-long simulations. Determining when a large subsample of STARLINK is temporally strongly connected is further analyzed using novel metrics introduced here that are inspired by topological data analysis (TDA). To better model networking scenarios between the Earth and Mars, we introduce various semi-rings capable of modeling propagation delay as well as protocols common to Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), such as store-and-forward. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of zigzag persistence for featurizing different space networks and demonstrate the efficacy of K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classification for distinguishing Earth-Mars and Earth-Moon satellite systems using time-varying topology alone.

The multivariate Hawkes process (MHP) is widely used for analyzing data streams that interact with each other, where events generate new events within their own dimension (via self-excitation) or across different dimensions (via cross-excitation). However, in certain applications, the timestamps of individual events in some dimensions are unobservable, and only event counts within intervals are known, referred to as partially interval-censored data. The MHP is unsuitable for handling such data since its estimation requires event timestamps. In this study, we introduce the Partial Mean Behavior Poisson (PMBP) process, a novel point process which shares parameter equivalence with the MHP and can effectively model both timestamped and interval-censored data. We demonstrate the capabilities of the PMBP process using synthetic and real-world datasets. Firstly, we illustrate that the PMBP process can approximate MHP parameters and recover the spectral radius using synthetic event histories. Next, we assess the performance of the PMBP process in predicting YouTube popularity and find that it surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we leverage the PMBP process to gain qualitative insights from a dataset comprising daily COVID-19 case counts from multiple countries and COVID-19-related news articles. By clustering the PMBP-modeled countries, we unveil hidden interaction patterns between occurrences of COVID-19 cases and news reporting.

Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models which simulate stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to generate data from noise. Although diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, they have limitations in the unpaired image-to-image translation tasks due to the Gaussian prior assumption. Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB), which learns an SDE to translate between two arbitrary distributions, have risen as an attractive solution to this problem. However, none of SB models so far have been successful at unpaired translation between high-resolution images. In this work, we propose the Unpaired Neural Schr\"odinger Bridge (UNSB), which expresses SB problem as a sequence of adversarial learning problems. This allows us to incorporate advanced discriminators and regularization to learn a SB between unpaired data. We demonstrate that UNSB is scalable and successfully solves various unpaired image-to-image translation tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/cyclomon/UNSB}

Machine learning algorithms have grown in sophistication over the years and are increasingly deployed for real-life applications. However, when using machine learning techniques in practical settings, particularly in high-risk applications such as medicine and engineering, obtaining the failure probability of the predictive model is critical. We refer to this problem as the risk-assessment task. We focus on regression algorithms and the risk-assessment task of computing the probability of the true label lying inside an interval defined around the model's prediction. We solve the risk-assessment problem using the conformal prediction approach, which provides prediction intervals that are guaranteed to contain the true label with a given probability. Using this coverage property, we prove that our approximated failure probability is conservative in the sense that it is not lower than the true failure probability of the ML algorithm. We conduct extensive experiments to empirically study the accuracy of the proposed method for problems with and without covariate shift. Our analysis focuses on different modeling regimes, dataset sizes, and conformal prediction methodologies.

Real-world deployment of machine learning models is challenging because data evolves over time. While no model can work when data evolves in an arbitrary fashion, if there is some pattern to these changes, we might be able to design methods to address it. This paper addresses situations when data evolves gradually. We introduce a time-varying propensity score that can detect gradual shifts in the distribution of data which allows us to selectively sample past data to update the model -- not just similar data from the past like that of a standard propensity score but also data that evolved in a similar fashion in the past. The time-varying propensity score is quite general: we demonstrate different ways of implementing it and evaluate it on a variety of problems ranging from supervised learning (e.g., image classification problems) where data undergoes a sequence of gradual shifts, to reinforcement learning tasks (e.g., robotic manipulation and continuous control) where data shifts as the policy or the task changes.

We propose a federated averaging Langevin algorithm (FA-LD) for uncertainty quantification and mean predictions with distributed clients. In particular, we generalize beyond normal posterior distributions and consider a general class of models. We develop theoretical guarantees for FA-LD for strongly log-concave distributions with non-i.i.d data and study how the injected noise and the stochastic-gradient noise, the heterogeneity of data, and the varying learning rates affect the convergence. Such an analysis sheds light on the optimal choice of local updates to minimize communication costs. Important to our approach is that the communication efficiency does not deteriorate with the injected noise in the Langevin algorithms. In addition, we examine in our FA-LD algorithm both independent and correlated noise used over different clients. We observe there is a trade-off between the pairs among communication, accuracy, and data privacy. As local devices may become inactive in federated networks, we also show convergence results based on different averaging schemes where only partial device updates are available. In such a case, we discover an additional bias that does not decay to zero.

There is a niche of companies responsible for intermediating the purchase of large batches of varied products for other companies, for which the main challenge is to perform product description standardization, i.e., matching an item described by a client with a product described in a catalog. The problem is complex since the client's product description may be: (1) potentially noisy; (2) short and uninformative (e.g., missing information about model and size); and (3) cross-language. In this paper, we formalize this problem as a ranking task: given an initial client product specification (query), return the most appropriate standardized descriptions (response). In this paper, we propose TPDR, a two-step Transformer-based Product and Class Description Retrieval method that is able to explore the semantic correspondence between IS and SD, by exploiting attention mechanisms and contrastive learning. First, TPDR employs the transformers as two encoders sharing the embedding vector space: one for encoding the IS and another for the SD, in which corresponding pairs (IS, SD) must be close in the vector space. Closeness is further enforced by a contrastive learning mechanism leveraging a specialized loss function. TPDR also exploits a (second) re-ranking step based on syntactic features that are very important for the exact matching (model, dimension) of certain products that may have been neglected by the transformers. To evaluate our proposal, we consider 11 datasets from a real company, covering different application contexts. Our solution was able to retrieve the correct standardized product before the 5th ranking position in 71% of the cases and its correct category in the first position in 80% of the situations. Moreover, the effectiveness gains over purely syntactic or semantic baselines reach up to 3.7 times, solving cases that none of the approaches in isolation can do by themselves.

Posterior sampling has been shown to be a powerful Bayesian approach for solving imaging inverse problems. The recent plug-and-play unadjusted Langevin algorithm (PnP-ULA) has emerged as a promising method for Monte Carlo sampling and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation by combining physical measurement models with deep-learning priors specified using image denoisers. However, the intricate relationship between the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA and the mismatched data-fidelity and denoiser has not been theoretically analyzed. We address this gap by proposing a posterior-L2 pseudometric and using it to quantify an explicit error bound for PnP-ULA under mismatched posterior distribution. We numerically validate our theory on several inverse problems such as sampling from Gaussian mixture models and image deblurring. Our results suggest that the sensitivity of the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA to a mismatch in the measurement model and the denoiser can be precisely characterized.

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects from a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning. We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks. Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets.

Despite the recent emergence of video captioning models, how to generate vivid, fine-grained video descriptions based on the background knowledge (i.e., long and informative commentary about the domain-specific scenes with appropriate reasoning) is still far from being solved, which however has great applications such as automatic sports narrative. In this paper, we present GOAL, a benchmark of over 8.9k soccer video clips, 22k sentences, and 42k knowledge triples for proposing a challenging new task setting as Knowledge-grounded Video Captioning (KGVC). Moreover, we conduct experimental adaption of existing methods to show the difficulty and potential directions for solving this valuable and applicable task. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/goal.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) learn the representation of nodes in a graph by aggregating the neighborhood information in various ways. As these networks grow in depth, their receptive field grows exponentially due to the increase in neighborhood sizes, resulting in high memory costs. Graph sampling solves memory issues in GNNs by sampling a small ratio of the nodes in the graph. This way, GNNs can scale to much larger graphs. Most sampling methods focus on fixed sampling heuristics, which may not generalize to different structures or tasks. We introduce GRAPES, an adaptive graph sampling method that learns to identify sets of influential nodes for training a GNN classifier. GRAPES uses a GFlowNet to learn node sampling probabilities given the classification objectives. We evaluate GRAPES across several small- and large-scale graph benchmarks and demonstrate its effectiveness in accuracy and scalability. In contrast to existing sampling methods, GRAPES maintains high accuracy even with small sample sizes and, therefore, can scale to very large graphs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dfdazac/grapes.

Nowadays, billions of people engage in communication and express their opinions on the internet daily. Unfortunately, not all of these expressions are friendly or compliant, making content moderation an indispensable task. With the successful development of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, LLM-based methods have become a feasible solution for handling tasks in various domains. However, in the field of content moderation, there is still a lack of detailed work that systematically introduces implementation details. In this paper, we introduce how to fine-tune an LLM model that can be privately deployed for content moderation. Specifically, we discuss whether incorporating reasons during the fine-tuning process would be better or if it should be treated as a classification task directly. We also explore the benefits of utilizing reasons generated by more powerful LLMs for fine-tuning privately deployed models and the impact of different processing approaches when the answers generated by the more powerful LLMs are incorrect. We report the entire research process and the key findings in this paper, hoping to provide valuable experience for researchers who are fine-tuning privately deployed models in their domain-specific research.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) provides a foundation model by integrating natural language into visual concepts, enabling zero-shot recognition on downstream tasks. It is usually expected that satisfactory overall accuracy can be achieved across numerous domains through well-designed textual prompts. However, we found that their performance in the worst categories is significantly inferior to the overall performance. For example, on ImageNet, there are a total of 10 categories with class-wise accuracy as low as 0\%, even though the overall performance has achieved 64.1\%. This phenomenon reveals the potential risks associated with using CLIP models, particularly in risk-sensitive applications where specific categories hold significant importance. To address this issue, we investigate the alignment between the two modalities in the CLIP model and propose the Class-wise Matching Margin (\cmm) to measure the inference confusion. \cmm\ can effectively identify the worst-performing categories and estimate the potential performance of the candidate prompts. We further query large language models to enrich descriptions of worst-performing categories and build a weighted ensemble to highlight the efficient prompts. Experimental results clearly verify the effectiveness of our proposal, where the accuracy on the worst-10 categories on ImageNet is boosted to 5.2\%, without manual prompt engineering, laborious optimization, or access to labeled validation data.

Deep learning-based numerical schemes for solving high-dimensional backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) have recently raised plenty of scientific interest. While they enable numerical methods to approximate very high-dimensional BSDEs, their reliability has not been studied and is thus not understood. In this work, we study uncertainty quantification (UQ) for a class of deep learning-based BSDE schemes. More precisely, we review the sources of uncertainty involved in the schemes and numerically study the impact of different sources. Usually, the standard deviation (STD) of the approximate solutions obtained from multiple runs of the algorithm with different datasets is calculated to address the uncertainty. This approach is computationally quite expensive, especially for high-dimensional problems. Hence, we develop a UQ model that efficiently estimates the STD of the approximate solution using only a single run of the algorithm. The model also estimates the mean of the approximate solution, which can be leveraged to initialize the algorithm and improve the optimization process. Our numerical experiments show that the UQ model produces reliable estimates of the mean and STD of the approximate solution for the considered class of deep learning-based BSDE schemes. The estimated STD captures multiple sources of uncertainty, demonstrating its effectiveness in quantifying the uncertainty. Additionally, the model illustrates the improved performance when comparing different schemes based on the estimated STD values. Furthermore, it can identify hyperparameter values for which the scheme achieves good approximations.

Probabilistic modelling of power systems operation and planning processes depends on data-driven methods, which require sufficiently large datasets. When historical data lacks this, it is desired to model the underlying data generation mechanism as a probability distribution to assess the data quality and generate more data, if needed. Kernel density estimation (KDE) based models are popular choices for this task, but they fail to adapt to data regions with varying densities. In this paper, an adaptive KDE model is employed to circumvent this, where each kernel in the model has an individual bandwidth. The leave-one-out maximum log-likelihood (LOO-MLL) criterion is proposed to prevent the singular solutions that the regular MLL criterion gives rise to, and it is proven that LOO-MLL prevents these. Relying on this guaranteed robustness, the model is extended by assigning learnable weights to the kernels. In addition, a modified expectation-maximization algorithm is employed to accelerate the optimization speed reliably. The performance of the proposed method and models are exhibited on two power systems datasets using different statistical tests and by comparison with Gaussian mixture models. Results show that the proposed models have promising performance, in addition to their singularity prevention guarantees.

Multi-fidelity (MF) methods are gaining popularity for enhancing surrogate modeling and design optimization by incorporating data from various low-fidelity (LF) models. While most existing MF methods assume a fixed dataset, adaptive sampling methods that dynamically allocate resources among fidelity models can achieve higher efficiency in the exploring and exploiting the design space. However, most existing MF methods rely on the hierarchical assumption of fidelity levels or fail to capture the intercorrelation between multiple fidelity levels and utilize it to quantify the value of the future samples and navigate the adaptive sampling. To address this hurdle, we propose a framework hinged on a latent embedding for different fidelity models and the associated pre-posterior analysis to explicitly utilize their correlation for adaptive sampling. In this framework, each infill sampling iteration includes two steps: We first identify the location of interest with the greatest potential improvement using the high-fidelity (HF) model, then we search for the next sample across all fidelity levels that maximize the improvement per unit cost at the location identified in the first step. This is made possible by a single Latent Variable Gaussian Process (LVGP) model that maps different fidelity models into an interpretable latent space to capture their correlations without assuming hierarchical fidelity levels. The LVGP enables us to assess how LF sampling candidates will affect HF response with pre-posterior analysis and determine the next sample with the best benefit-to-cost ratio. Through test cases, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the benchmark methods in both MF global fitting (GF) and Bayesian Optimization (BO) problems in convergence rate and robustness. Moreover, the method offers the flexibility to switch between GF and BO by simply changing the acquisition function.

Evaluating the readability of a text can significantly facilitate the precise expression of information in written form. The formulation of text readability assessment involves the identification of meaningful properties of the text regardless of its length. Sophisticated features and models are used to evaluate the comprehensibility of texts accurately. Despite this, the problem of assessing texts' readability efficiently remains relatively untouched. The efficiency of state-of-the-art text readability assessment models can be further improved using deep reinforcement learning models. Using a hard attention-based active inference technique, the proposed approach makes efficient use of input text and computational resources. Through the use of semi-supervised signals, the reinforcement learning model uses the minimum amount of text in order to determine text's readability. A comparison of the model on Weebit and Cambridge Exams with state-of-the-art models, such as the BERT text readability model, shows that it is capable of achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with a significantly smaller amount of input text than other models.

We study model pruning methods applied to Transformer-based neural network language models for automatic speech recognition. We explore three aspects of the pruning frame work, namely criterion, method and scheduler, analyzing their contribution in terms of accuracy and inference speed. To the best of our knowledge, such in-depth analyses on large-scale recognition systems has not been reported in the literature. In addition, we propose a variant of low-rank approximation suitable for incrementally compressing models, and delivering multiple models with varied target sizes. Among other results, we show that a) data-driven pruning outperforms magnitude-driven in several scenarios; b) incremental pruning achieves higher accuracy compared to one-shot pruning, especially when targeting smaller sizes; and c) low-rank approximation presents the best trade-off between size reduction and inference speed-up for moderate compression.

Accurate forecasts of electricity prices are crucial for the management of electric power systems and the development of smart applications. European electricity prices have risen substantially and became highly volatile after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, challenging established forecasting methods. Here, we present a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for the German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity prices addressing these challenges. The recurrent structure of the LSTM allows the model to adapt to trends, while the joint prediction of both mean and standard deviation enables a probabilistic prediction. Using a physics-inspired approach - superstatistics - to derive an explanation for the statistics of prices, we show that the LSTM model faithfully reproduces both prices and their volatility.

Problem Definition: Are traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, developed for a broad range of purposes including game-play and robotics, the most suitable machine learning algorithms for applications in inventory control? To what extent would DRL algorithms tailored to the unique characteristics of inventory control problems provide superior performance compared to DRL and traditional benchmarks? Methodology/results: We propose and study Deep Controlled Learning (DCL), a new DRL framework based on approximate policy iteration specifically designed to tackle inventory problems. Comparative evaluations reveal that DCL outperforms existing state-of-the-art heuristics in lost sales inventory control, perishable inventory systems, and inventory systems with random lead times, achieving lower average costs across all test instances and maintaining an optimality gap of no more than 0.1\%. Notably, the same hyperparameter set is utilized across all experiments, underscoring the robustness and generalizability of the proposed method. Managerial implications: These substantial performance and robustness improvements pave the way for the effective application of tailored DRL algorithms to inventory management problems, empowering decision-makers to optimize stock levels, minimize costs, and enhance responsiveness across various industries.

Weight decay is a standard technique to improve generalization performance in modern deep neural network optimization, and is also widely adopted in federated learning (FL) to prevent overfitting in local clients. In this paper, we first explore the choices of weight decay and identify that weight decay value appreciably influences the convergence of existing FL algorithms. While preventing overfitting is crucial, weight decay can introduce a different optimization goal towards the global objective, which is further amplified in FL due to multiple local updates and heterogeneous data distribution. To address this challenge, we develop {\it Federated optimization with Normalized Annealing Regularization} (FedNAR), a simple yet effective and versatile algorithmic plug-in that can be seamlessly integrated into any existing FL algorithms. Essentially, we regulate the magnitude of each update by performing co-clipping of the gradient and weight decay. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of FedNAR's convergence rate and conduct extensive experiments on both vision and language datasets with different backbone federated optimization algorithms. Our experimental results consistently demonstrate that incorporating FedNAR into existing FL algorithms leads to accelerated convergence and heightened model accuracy. Moreover, FedNAR exhibits resilience in the face of various hyperparameter configurations. Specifically, FedNAR has the ability to self-adjust the weight decay when the initial specification is not optimal, while the accuracy of traditional FL algorithms would markedly decline. Our codes are released at \href{https://github.com/ljb121002/fednar}{https://github.com/ljb121002/fednar}.

Autonomous robots must navigate reliably in unknown environments even under compromised exteroceptive perception, or perception failures. Such failures often occur when harsh environments lead to degraded sensing, or when the perception algorithm misinterprets the scene due to limited generalization. In this paper, we model perception failures as invisible obstacles and pits, and train a reinforcement learning (RL) based local navigation policy to guide our legged robot. Unlike previous works relying on heuristics and anomaly detection to update navigational information, we train our navigation policy to reconstruct the environment information in the latent space from corrupted perception and react to perception failures end-to-end. To this end, we incorporate both proprioception and exteroception into our policy inputs, thereby enabling the policy to sense collisions on different body parts and pits, prompting corresponding reactions. We validate our approach in simulation and on the real quadruped robot ANYmal running in real-time (<10 ms CPU inference). In a quantitative comparison with existing heuristic-based locally reactive planners, our policy increases the success rate over 30% when facing perception failures. Project Page: https://bit.ly/45NBTuh.

In this paper, we introduce TimeGPT, the first foundation model for time series, capable of generating accurate predictions for diverse datasets not seen during training. We evaluate our pre-trained model against established statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods, demonstrating that TimeGPT zero-shot inference excels in performance, efficiency, and simplicity. Our study provides compelling evidence that insights from other domains of artificial intelligence can be effectively applied to time series analysis. We conclude that large-scale time series models offer an exciting opportunity to democratize access to precise predictions and reduce uncertainty by leveraging the capabilities of contemporary advancements in deep learning.

Numerical models of electromyographic (EMG) signals have provided a huge contribution to our fundamental understanding of human neurophysiology and remain a central pillar of motor neuroscience and the development of human-machine interfaces. However, whilst modern biophysical simulations based on finite element methods are highly accurate, they are extremely computationally expensive and thus are generally limited to modelling static systems such as isometrically contracting limbs. As a solution to this problem, we propose a transfer learning approach, in which a conditional generative model is trained to mimic the output of an advanced numerical model. To this end, we present BioMime, a conditional generative neural network trained adversarially to generate motor unit activation potential waveforms under a wide variety of volume conductor parameters. We demonstrate the ability of such a model to predictively interpolate between a much smaller number of numerical model's outputs with a high accuracy. Consequently, the computational load is dramatically reduced, which allows the rapid simulation of EMG signals during truly dynamic and naturalistic movements.

The 5' UTR, a regulatory region at the beginning of an mRNA molecule, plays a crucial role in regulating the translation process and impacts the protein expression level. Language models have showcased their effectiveness in decoding the functions of protein and genome sequences. Here, we introduced a language model for 5' UTR, which we refer to as the UTR-LM. The UTR-LM is pre-trained on endogenous 5' UTRs from multiple species and is further augmented with supervised information including secondary structure and minimum free energy. We fine-tuned the UTR-LM in a variety of downstream tasks. The model outperformed the best-known benchmark by up to 42% for predicting the Mean Ribosome Loading, and by up to 60% for predicting the Translation Efficiency and the mRNA Expression Level. The model also applies to identifying unannotated Internal Ribosome Entry Sites within the untranslated region and improves the AUPR from 0.37 to 0.52 compared to the best baseline. Further, we designed a library of 211 novel 5' UTRs with high predicted values of translation efficiency and evaluated them via a wet-lab assay. Experiment results confirmed that our top designs achieved a 32.5% increase in protein production level relative to well-established 5' UTR optimized for therapeutics.

Bayesian optimization is an effective method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. High-dimensional problems are particularly challenging as the surrogate model of the objective suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which makes accurate modeling difficult. We propose a group testing approach to identify active variables to facilitate efficient optimization in these domains. The proposed algorithm, Group Testing Bayesian Optimization (GTBO), first runs a testing phase where groups of variables are systematically selected and tested on whether they influence the objective. To that end, we extend the well-established theory of group testing to functions of continuous ranges. In the second phase, GTBO guides optimization by placing more importance on the active dimensions. By exploiting the axis-aligned subspace assumption, GTBO is competitive against state-of-the-art methods on several synthetic and real-world high-dimensional optimization tasks. Furthermore, GTBO aids in the discovery of active parameters in applications, thereby enhancing practitioners' understanding of the problem at hand.

Privacy and Byzantine resilience (BR) are two crucial requirements of modern-day distributed machine learning. The two concepts have been extensively studied individually but the question of how to combine them effectively remains unanswered. This paper contributes to addressing this question by studying the extent to which the distributed SGD algorithm, in the standard parameter-server architecture, can learn an accurate model despite (a) a fraction of the workers being malicious (Byzantine), and (b) the other fraction, whilst being honest, providing noisy information to the server to ensure differential privacy (DP). We first observe that the integration of standard practices in DP and BR is not straightforward. In fact, we show that many existing results on the convergence of distributed SGD under Byzantine faults, especially those relying on $(\alpha,f)$-Byzantine resilience, are rendered invalid when honest workers enforce DP. To circumvent this shortcoming, we revisit the theory of $(\alpha,f)$-BR to obtain an approximate convergence guarantee. Our analysis provides key insights on how to improve this guarantee through hyperparameter optimization. Essentially, our theoretical and empirical results show that (1) an imprudent combination of standard approaches to DP and BR might be fruitless, but (2) by carefully re-tuning the learning algorithm, we can obtain reasonable learning accuracy while simultaneously guaranteeing DP and BR.

Scientific experimentation involves an iterative process of creating hypotheses, designing experiments, running experiments, and analyzing the results. Can we build AI research agents to perform these long-horizon tasks? To take a step towards building and evaluating research agents on such open-ended decision-making tasks, we focus on the problem of machine learning engineering: given a task description and a dataset, build a high-performing model. In this paper, we propose MLAgentBench, a suite of ML tasks for benchmarking AI research agents. Agents can perform actions like reading/writing files, executing code, and inspecting outputs. With these actions, agents could run experiments, analyze the results, and modify the code of entire machine learning pipelines, such as data processing, architecture, training processes, etc. The benchmark then automatically evaluates the agent's performance objectively over various metrics related to performance and efficiency. We also design an LLM-based research agent to automatically perform experimentation loops in such an environment. Empirically, we find that a GPT-4-based research agent can feasibly build compelling ML models over many tasks in MLAgentBench, displaying highly interpretable plans and actions. However, the success rates vary considerably; they span from almost 90\% on well-established older datasets to as low as 10\% on recent Kaggle Challenges -- unavailable during the LLM model's pretraining -- and even 0\% on newer research challenges like BabyLM. Finally, we identify several key challenges for LLM-based research agents such as long-term planning and hallucination. Our code is released at https://github.com/snap-stanford/MLAgentBench.

Interpretability methods are valuable only if their explanations faithfully describe the explained model. In this work, we consider neural networks whose predictions are invariant under a specific symmetry group. This includes popular architectures, ranging from convolutional to graph neural networks. Any explanation that faithfully explains this type of model needs to be in agreement with this invariance property. We formalize this intuition through the notion of explanation invariance and equivariance by leveraging the formalism from geometric deep learning. Through this rigorous formalism, we derive (1) two metrics to measure the robustness of any interpretability method with respect to the model symmetry group; (2) theoretical robustness guarantees for some popular interpretability methods and (3) a systematic approach to increase the invariance of any interpretability method with respect to a symmetry group. By empirically measuring our metrics for explanations of models associated with various modalities and symmetry groups, we derive a set of 5 guidelines to allow users and developers of interpretability methods to produce robust explanations.

Moving deep learning models from the laboratory setting to the open world entails preparing them to handle unforeseen conditions. In several applications the occurrence of novel classes during deployment poses a significant threat, thus it is crucial to effectively detect them. Ideally, this skill should be used when needed without requiring any further computational training effort at every new task. Out-of-distribution detection has attracted significant attention in the last years, however the majority of the studies deal with 2D images ignoring the inherent 3D nature of the real-world and often confusing between domain and semantic novelty. In this work, we focus on the latter, considering the objects geometric structure captured by 3D point clouds regardless of the specific domain. We advance the field by introducing OpenPatch that builds on a large pre-trained model and simply extracts from its intermediate features a set of patch representations that describe each known class. For any new sample, we obtain a novelty score by evaluating whether it can be recomposed mainly by patches of a single known class or rather via the contribution of multiple classes. We present an extensive experimental evaluation of our approach for the task of semantic novelty detection on real-world point cloud samples when the reference known data are synthetic. We demonstrate that OpenPatch excels in both the full and few-shot known sample scenarios, showcasing its robustness across varying pre-training objectives and network backbones. The inherent training-free nature of our method allows for its immediate application to a wide array of real-world tasks, offering a compelling advantage over approaches that need expensive retraining efforts.

Recently there has been increasing interest in developing and deploying deep graph learning algorithms for many tasks, such as fraud detection and recommender systems. Albeit, there is a limited number of publicly available graph-structured datasets, most of which are tiny compared to production-sized applications or are limited in their application domain. This work tackles this shortcoming by proposing a scalable synthetic graph generation tool to scale the datasets to production-size graphs with trillions of edges and billions of nodes. The tool learns a series of parametric models from proprietary datasets that can be released to researchers to study various graph methods on the synthetic data increasing prototype development and novel applications. We demonstrate the generalizability of the framework across a series of datasets, mimicking structural and feature distributions as well as the ability to scale them across varying sizes demonstrating their usefulness for benchmarking and model development. Code can be found on https://github.com/NVIDIA/DeepLearningExamples/tree/master/Tools/DGLPyTorch/SyntheticGraphGeneration.

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are general purpose problem solvers applicable to a diverse set of tasks with prompts. They can be further improved towards a specific task by fine-tuning on a specialized dataset. However, fine-tuning usually makes the model narrowly specialized on this dataset with reduced general in-context learning performances, which is undesirable whenever the fine-tuned model needs to handle additional tasks where no fine-tuning data is available. In this work, we first demonstrate that fine-tuning on a single task indeed decreases LLMs' general in-context learning performance. We discover one important cause of such forgetting, format specialization, where the model overfits to the format of the fine-tuned task. We further show that format specialization happens at the very beginning of fine-tuning. To solve this problem, we propose Prompt Tuning with MOdel Tuning (ProMoT), a simple yet effective two-stage fine-tuning framework that reduces format specialization and improves generalization. ProMoT offloads task-specific format learning into additional and removable parameters by first doing prompt tuning and then fine-tuning the model itself with this soft prompt attached. With experiments on several fine-tuning tasks and 8 in-context evaluation tasks, we show that ProMoT achieves comparable performance on fine-tuned tasks to standard fine-tuning, but with much less loss of in-context learning performances across a board range of out-of-domain evaluation tasks. More importantly, ProMoT can even enhance generalization on in-context learning tasks that are semantically related to the fine-tuned task, e.g. ProMoT on En-Fr translation significantly improves performance on other language pairs, and ProMoT on NLI improves performance on summarization. Experiments also show that ProMoT can improve the generalization performance of multi-task training.

Adversarial attacks have the potential to mislead deep neural network classifiers by introducing slight perturbations. Developing algorithms that can mitigate the effects of these attacks is crucial for ensuring the safe use of artificial intelligence. Recent studies have suggested that score-based diffusion models are effective in adversarial defenses. However, existing diffusion-based defenses rely on the sequential simulation of the reversed stochastic differential equations of diffusion models, which are computationally inefficient and yield suboptimal results. In this paper, we introduce a novel adversarial defense scheme named ScoreOpt, which optimizes adversarial samples at test-time, towards original clean data in the direction guided by score-based priors. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing adversarial defenses in terms of both robustness performance and inference speed.

Traffic signs play a critical role in road safety and traffic management for autonomous driving systems. Accurate traffic sign classification is essential but challenging due to real-world complexities like adversarial examples and occlusions. To address these issues, binary neural networks offer promise in constructing classifiers suitable for resource-constrained devices. In our previous work, we proposed high-accuracy BNN models for traffic sign recognition, focusing on compact size for limited computation and energy resources. To evaluate their local robustness, this paper introduces a set of benchmark problems featuring layers that challenge state-of-the-art verification tools. These layers include binarized convolutions, max pooling, batch normalization, fully connected. The difficulty of the verification problem is given by the high number of network parameters (905k - 1.7 M), of the input dimension (2.7k-12k), and of the number of regions (43) as well by the fact that the neural networks are not sparse. The proposed BNN models and local robustness properties can be checked at https://github.com/ChristopherBrix/vnncomp2023_benchmarks/tree/main/benchmarks/traffic_signs_recognition. The results of the 4th International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP'23) revealed the fact that 4, out of 7, solvers can handle many of our benchmarks randomly selected (minimum is 6, maximum is 36, out of 45). Surprisingly, tools output also wrong results or missing counterexample (ranging from 1 to 4). Currently, our focus lies in exploring the possibility of achieving a greater count of solved instances by extending the allotted time (previously set at 8 minutes). Furthermore, we are intrigued by the reasons behind the erroneous outcomes provided by the tools for certain benchmarks.

This literature review aimed to compare various time-series analysis approaches utilized in forecasting COVID-19 cases in Africa. The study involved a methodical search for English-language research papers published between January 2020 and July 2023, focusing specifically on papers that utilized time-series analysis approaches on COVID-19 datasets in Africa. A variety of databases including PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science were utilized for this process. The research papers underwent an evaluation process to extract relevant information regarding the implementation and performance of the time-series analysis models. The study highlighted the different methodologies employed, evaluating their effectiveness and limitations in forecasting the spread of the virus. The result of this review could contribute deeper insights into the field, and future research should consider these insights to improve time series analysis models and explore the integration of different approaches for enhanced public health decision-making.

Sparse deep learning has become a popular technique for improving the performance of deep neural networks in areas such as uncertainty quantification, variable selection, and large-scale network compression. However, most existing research has focused on problems where the observations are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), and there has been little work on the problems where the observations are dependent, such as time series data and sequential data in natural language processing. This paper aims to address this gap by studying the theory for sparse deep learning with dependent data. We show that sparse recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can be consistently estimated, and their predictions are asymptotically normally distributed under appropriate assumptions, enabling the prediction uncertainty to be correctly quantified. Our numerical results show that sparse deep learning outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as conformal predictions, in prediction uncertainty quantification for time series data. Furthermore, our results indicate that the proposed method can consistently identify the autoregressive order for time series data and outperform existing methods in large-scale model compression. Our proposed method has important practical implications in fields such as finance, healthcare, and energy, where both accurate point estimates and prediction uncertainty quantification are of concern.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial noise. Adversarial training (AT) has been demonstrated to be the most effective defense strategy to protect neural networks from being fooled. However, we find AT omits to learning robust features, resulting in poor performance of adversarial robustness. To address this issue, we highlight two characteristics of robust representation: (1) $\bf{exclusion}$: the feature of natural examples keeps away from that of other classes; (2) $\bf{alignment}$: the feature of natural and corresponding adversarial examples is close to each other. These motivate us to propose a generic framework of AT to gain robust representation, by the asymmetric negative contrast and reverse attention. Specifically, we design an asymmetric negative contrast based on predicted probabilities, to push away examples of different classes in the feature space. Moreover, we propose to weight feature by parameters of the linear classifier as the reverse attention, to obtain class-aware feature and pull close the feature of the same class. Empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets show our methods greatly advance the robustness of AT and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at .

The success of Transformer models has pushed the deep learning model scale to billions of parameters. Due to the limited memory resource of a single GPU, However, the best practice for choosing the optimal parallel strategy is still lacking, since it requires domain expertise in both deep learning and parallel computing. The Colossal-AI system addressed the above challenge by introducing a unified interface to scale your sequential code of model training to distributed environments. It supports parallel training methods such as data, pipeline, tensor, and sequence parallelism, as well as heterogeneous training methods integrated with zero redundancy optimizer. Compared to the baseline system, Colossal-AI can achieve up to 2.76 times training speedup on large-scale models.

We present a versatile adaptation of existing dimensionality reduction (DR) objectives, enabling the simultaneous reduction of both sample and feature sizes. Correspondances between input and embedding samples are computed through a semi-relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport (OT) problem. When the embedding sample size matches that of the input, our model recovers classical popular DR models. When the embedding's dimensionality is unconstrained, we show that the OT plan delivers a competitive hard clustering. We emphasize the importance of intermediate stages that blend DR and clustering for summarizing real data and apply our method to visualize datasets of images.

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to identify actions' start, end, and class labels in untrimmed videos. While recent advancements using transformer networks and Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) have enhanced visual feature recognition in TAL tasks, less progress has been made in the integration of audio features into such frameworks. This paper introduces the Multi-Resolution Audio-Visual Feature Fusion (MRAV-FF), an innovative method to merge audio-visual data across different temporal resolutions. Central to our approach is a hierarchical gated cross-attention mechanism, which discerningly weighs the importance of audio information at diverse temporal scales. Such a technique not only refines the precision of regression boundaries but also bolsters classification confidence. Importantly, MRAV-FF is versatile, making it compatible with existing FPN TAL architectures and offering a significant enhancement in performance when audio data is available.

The theoretical landscape of federated learning (FL) undergoes rapid evolution, but its practical application encounters a series of intricate challenges, and hyperparameter optimization is one of these critical challenges. Amongst the diverse adjustments in hyperparameters, the adaptation of the learning rate emerges as a crucial component, holding the promise of significantly enhancing the efficacy of FL systems. In response to this critical need, this paper presents FedHyper, a novel hypergradient-based learning rate adaptation algorithm specifically designed for FL. FedHyper serves as a universal learning rate scheduler that can adapt both global and local rates as the training progresses. In addition, FedHyper not only showcases unparalleled robustness to a spectrum of initial learning rate configurations but also significantly alleviates the necessity for laborious empirical learning rate adjustments. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of FedHyper's convergence rate and conduct extensive experiments on vision and language benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that FEDHYPER consistently converges 1.1-3x faster than FedAvg and the competing baselines while achieving superior final accuracy. Moreover, FedHyper catalyzes a remarkable surge in accuracy, augmenting it by up to 15% compared to FedAvg under suboptimal initial learning rate settings.

The fundamental problem in toxicity detection task lies in the fact that the toxicity is ill-defined. This causes us to rely on subjective and vague data in models' training, which results in non-robust and non-accurate results: garbage in - garbage out. This work suggests a new, stress-level-based definition of toxicity designed to be objective and context-aware. On par with it, we also describe possible ways of applying this new definition to dataset creation and model training.

In this paper, we study how the granularity of pretraining labels affects the generalization of deep neural networks in image classification tasks. We focus on the "fine-to-coarse" transfer learning setting, where the pretraining label space is more fine-grained than that of the target problem. Empirically, we show that pretraining on the leaf labels of ImageNet21k produces better transfer results on ImageNet1k than pretraining on other coarser granularity levels, which supports the common practice used in the community. Theoretically, we explain the benefit of fine-grained pretraining by proving that, for a data distribution satisfying certain hierarchy conditions, 1) coarse-grained pretraining only allows a neural network to learn the "common" or "easy-to-learn" features well, while 2) fine-grained pretraining helps the network learn the "rarer" or "fine-grained" features in addition to the common ones, thus improving its accuracy on hard downstream test samples in which common features are missing or weak in strength. Furthermore, we perform comprehensive experiments using the label hierarchies of iNaturalist 2021 and observe that the following conditions, in addition to proper choice of label granularity, enable the transfer to work well in practice: 1) the pretraining dataset needs to have a meaningful label hierarchy, and 2) the pretraining and target label functions need to align well.

This paper studies generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to sample objects from the Boltzmann energy distribution via a sequence of actions. In particular, we focus on improving GFlowNet with partial inference: training flow functions with the evaluation of the intermediate states or transitions. To this end, the recently developed forward-looking GFlowNet reparameterizes the flow functions based on evaluating the energy of intermediate states. However, such an evaluation of intermediate energies may (i) be too expensive or impossible to evaluate and (ii) even provide misleading training signals under large energy fluctuations along the sequence of actions. To resolve this issue, we propose learning energy decompositions for GFlowNets (LED-GFN). Our main idea is to (i) decompose the energy of an object into learnable potential functions defined on state transitions and (ii) reparameterize the flow functions using the potential functions. In particular, to produce informative local credits, we propose to regularize the potential to change smoothly over the sequence of actions. It is also noteworthy that training GFlowNet with our learned potential can preserve the optimal policy. We empirically verify the superiority of LED-GFN in five problems including the generation of unstructured and maximum independent sets, molecular graphs, and RNA sequences.

We identify hidden layers inside a DNN with group actions on the data space, and formulate the DNN as a dual voice transform with respect to Koopman operator, a linear representation of the group action. Based on the group theoretic arguments, particularly by using Schur's lemma, we show a simple proof of the universality of those DNNs.

A maturing area of research in deep learning is the development of architectures that can learn explicit representations of relational features. In this paper, we focus on the problem of learning representations of hierarchical relations, proposing an architectural framework we call "relational convolutional networks". Given a sequence of objects, a "multi-dimensional inner product relation" module produces a relation tensor describing all pairwise relations. A "relational convolution" layer then transforms the relation tensor into a sequence of new objects, each describing the relations within some group of objects at the previous layer. Graphlet filters, analogous to filters in convolutional neural networks, represent a template of relations against which the relation tensor is compared at each grouping. Repeating this yields representations of higher-order, hierarchical relations. We present the motivation and details of the architecture, together with a set of experiments to demonstrate how relational convolutional networks can provide an effective framework for modeling relational tasks that have hierarchical structure.

We formalize and interpret the geometric structure of $d$-dimensional fully connected ReLU-layers in neural networks. The parameters of a ReLU-layer induce a natural partition of the input domain, such that in each sector of the partition, the ReLU-layer can be greatly simplified. This leads to a geometric interpretation of a ReLU-layer as a projection onto a polyhedral cone followed by an affine transformation, in line with the description in [doi:10.48550/arXiv.1905.08922] for convolutional networks with ReLU activations. Further, this structure facilitates simplified expressions for preimages of the intersection between partition sectors and hyperplanes, which is useful when describing decision boundaries in a classification setting. We investigate this in detail for a feed-forward network with one hidden ReLU-layer, where we provide results on the geometric complexity of the decision boundary generated by such networks, as well as proving that modulo an affine transformation, such a network can only generate $d$ different decision boundaries. Finally, the effect of adding more layers to the network is discussed.

Machine Learning (ML) techniques have found applications in estimating chemical kinetics properties. With the accumulated drug molecules identified through "AI4drug discovery", the next imperative lies in AI-driven design for high-throughput chemical synthesis processes, with the estimation of properties of unseen reactions with unexplored molecules. To this end, the existing ML approaches for kinetics property prediction are required to be Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalizable. In this paper, we categorize the OOD kinetic property prediction into three levels (structure, condition, and mechanism), revealing unique aspects of such problems. Under this framework, we create comprehensive datasets to benchmark (1) the state-of-the-art ML approaches for reaction prediction in the OOD setting and (2) the state-of-the-art graph OOD methods in kinetics property prediction problems. Our results demonstrated the challenges and opportunities in OOD kinetics property prediction. Our datasets and benchmarks can further support research in this direction.

Surrogate models play a crucial role in retrospectively interpreting complex and powerful black box machine learning models via model distillation. This paper focuses on using model-based trees as surrogate models which partition the feature space into interpretable regions via decision rules. Within each region, interpretable models based on additive main effects are used to approximate the behavior of the black box model, striking for an optimal balance between interpretability and performance. Four model-based tree algorithms, namely SLIM, GUIDE, MOB, and CTree, are compared regarding their ability to generate such surrogate models. We investigate fidelity, interpretability, stability, and the algorithms' capability to capture interaction effects through appropriate splits. Based on our comprehensive analyses, we finally provide an overview of user-specific recommendations.

Massive MIMO is expected to play an important role in the development of 5G networks. This paper addresses the issue of pilot contamination and scalability in massive MIMO systems. The current practice of reusing orthogonal pilot sequences in adjacent cells leads to difficulty in differentiating incoming inter- and intra-cell pilot sequences. One possible solution is to increase the number of orthogonal pilot sequences, which results in dedicating more space of coherence block to pilot transmission than data transmission. This, in turn, also hinders the scalability of massive MIMO systems, particularly in accommodating a large number of IoT devices within a cell. To overcome these challenges, this paper devises an innovative pilot allocation scheme based on the data transfer patterns of IoT devices. The scheme assigns orthogonal pilot sequences to clusters of devices instead of individual devices, allowing multiple devices to utilize the same pilot for periodically transmitting data. Moreover, we formulate the pilot assignment problem as a graph coloring problem and use the max k-cut graph partitioning approach to overcome the pilot contamination in a multicell massive MIMO system. The proposed scheme significantly improves the spectral efficiency and enables the scalability of massive MIMO systems; for instance, by using ten orthogonal pilot sequences, we are able to accommodate 200 devices with only a 12.5% omission rate.

This paper proposes a latent prompt Transformer model for solving challenging optimization problems such as molecule design, where the goal is to find molecules with optimal values of a target chemical or biological property that can be computed by an existing software. Our proposed model consists of three components. (1) A latent vector whose prior distribution is modeled by a Unet transformation of a Gaussian white noise vector. (2) A molecule generation model that generates the string-based representation of molecule conditional on the latent vector in (1). We adopt the causal Transformer model that takes the latent vector in (1) as prompt. (3) A property prediction model that predicts the value of the target property of a molecule based on a non-linear regression on the latent vector in (1). We call the proposed model the latent prompt Transformer model. After initial training of the model on existing molecules and their property values, we then gradually shift the model distribution towards the region that supports desired values of the target property for the purpose of molecule design. Our experiments show that our proposed model achieves state of the art performances on several benchmark molecule design tasks.

Energy justice is a growing area of interest in interdisciplinary energy research. However, identifying systematic biases in the energy sector remains challenging due to confounding variables, intricate heterogeneity in treatment effects, and limited data availability. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach for counterfactual causal analysis centered on energy justice. We use subgroup analysis to manage diverse factors and leverage the idea of transfer learning to mitigate data scarcity in each subgroup. In our numerical analysis, we apply our method to a large-scale customer-level power outage data set and investigate the counterfactual effect of demographic factors, such as income and age of the population, on power outage durations. Our results indicate that low-income and elderly-populated areas consistently experience longer power outages, regardless of weather conditions. This points to existing biases in the power system and highlights the need for focused improvements in areas with economic challenges.

Machine-learning phishing webpage detectors (ML-PWD) have been shown to suffer from adversarial manipulations of the HTML code of the input webpage. Nevertheless, the attacks recently proposed have demonstrated limited effectiveness due to their lack of optimizing the usage of the adopted manipulations, and they focus solely on specific elements of the HTML code. In this work, we overcome these limitations by first designing a novel set of fine-grained manipulations which allow to modify the HTML code of the input phishing webpage without compromising its maliciousness and visual appearance, i.e., the manipulations are functionality- and rendering-preserving by design. We then select which manipulations should be applied to bypass the target detector by a query-efficient black-box optimization algorithm. Our experiments show that our attacks are able to raze to the ground the performance of current state-of-the-art ML-PWD using just 30 queries, thus overcoming the weaker attacks developed in previous work, and enabling a much fairer robustness evaluation of ML-PWD.

History matching based on monitoring data will enable uncertainty reduction, and thus improved aquifer management, in industrial-scale carbon storage operations. In traditional model-based data assimilation, geomodel parameters are modified to force agreement between flow simulation results and observations. In data-space inversion (DSI), history-matched quantities of interest, e.g., posterior pressure and saturation fields conditioned to observations, are inferred directly, without constructing posterior geomodels. This is accomplished efficiently using a set of O(1000) prior simulation results, data parameterization, and posterior sampling within a Bayesian setting. In this study, we develop and implement (in DSI) a deep-learning-based parameterization to represent spatio-temporal pressure and CO2 saturation fields at a set of time steps. The new parameterization uses an adversarial autoencoder (AAE) for dimension reduction and a convolutional long short-term memory (convLSTM) network to represent the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of the pressure and saturation fields. This parameterization is used with an ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation (ESMDA) in the DSI framework to enable posterior predictions. A realistic 3D system characterized by prior geological realizations drawn from a range of geological scenarios is considered. A local grid refinement procedure is introduced to estimate the error covariance term that appears in the history matching formulation. Extensive history matching results are presented for various quantities, for multiple synthetic true models. Substantial uncertainty reduction in posterior pressure and saturation fields is achieved in all cases. The framework is applied to efficiently provide posterior predictions for a range of error covariance specifications. Such an assessment would be expensive using a model-based approach.

We propose a graphical structure for structural equation models that is stable under marginalization under linearity and Gaussianity assumptions. We show that computing the maximum likelihood estimation of this model is equivalent to training a neural network. We implement a GPU-based algorithm that computes the maximum likelihood estimation of these models.

Knowledge distillation constitutes a potent methodology for condensing substantial neural networks into more compact and efficient counterparts. Within this context, softmax regression representation learning serves as a widely embraced approach, leveraging a pre-established teacher network to guide the learning process of a diminutive student network. Notably, despite the extensive inquiry into the efficacy of softmax regression representation learning, the intricate underpinnings governing the knowledge transfer mechanism remain inadequately elucidated. This study introduces the 'Ideal Joint Classifier Knowledge Distillation' (IJCKD) framework, an overarching paradigm that not only furnishes a lucid and exhaustive comprehension of prevailing knowledge distillation techniques but also establishes a theoretical underpinning for prospective investigations. Employing mathematical methodologies derived from domain adaptation theory, this investigation conducts a comprehensive examination of the error boundary of the student network contingent upon the teacher network. Consequently, our framework facilitates efficient knowledge transference between teacher and student networks, thereby accommodating a diverse spectrum of applications.

Real-time intelligent detection and prediction of subjects' behavior particularly their movements or actions is critical in the ward. This approach offers the advantage of reducing in-hospital care costs and improving the efficiency of healthcare workers, which is especially true for scenarios at night or during peak admission periods. Therefore, in this work, we propose using computer vision (CV) and deep learning (DL) methods for detecting subjects and recognizing their actions. We utilize OpenPose as an accurate subject detector for recognizing the positions of human subjects in the video stream. Additionally, we employ AlphAction's Asynchronous Interaction Aggregation (AIA) network to predict the actions of detected subjects. This integrated model, referred to as PoseAction, is proposed. At the same time, the proposed model is further trained to predict 12 common actions in ward areas, such as staggering, chest pain, and falling down, using medical-related video clips from the NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets. The results demonstrate that PoseAction achieves the highest classification mAP of 98.72% (IoU@0.5). Additionally, this study develops an online real-time mode for action recognition, which strongly supports the clinical translation of PoseAction. Furthermore, using OpenPose's function for recognizing face key points, we also implement face blurring, which is a practical solution to address the privacy protection concerns of patients and healthcare workers. Nevertheless, the training data for PoseAction is currently limited, particularly in terms of label diversity. Consequently, the subsequent step involves utilizing a more diverse dataset (including general actions) to train the model's parameters for improved generalization.

Transformers have demonstrated their success in various domains and tasks. However, Transformers struggle with long input sequences due to their limited capacity. While one solution is to increase input length, endlessly stretching the length is unrealistic. Furthermore, humans selectively remember and use only relevant information from inputs, unlike Transformers which process all raw data from start to end. We introduce Memoria, a general memory network that applies Hebbian theory which is a major theory explaining human memory formulation to enhance long-term dependencies in neural networks. Memoria stores and retrieves information called engram at multiple memory levels of working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory, using connection weights that change according to Hebb's rule. Through experiments with popular Transformer-based models like BERT and GPT, we present that Memoria significantly improves the ability to consider long-term dependencies in various tasks. Results show that Memoria outperformed existing methodologies in sorting and language modeling, and long text classification.

Unsupervised pre-training is a common step in developing computer vision models and large language models. In this setting, the absence of labels requires the use of similarity-based loss functions, such as contrastive loss, that favor minimizing the distance between similar inputs and maximizing the distance between distinct inputs. As privacy concerns mount, training these models using differential privacy has become more important. However, due to how inputs are generated for these losses, one of their undesirable properties is that their $L_2$ sensitivity can grow with increasing batch size. This property is particularly disadvantageous for differentially private training methods, such as DP-SGD. To overcome this issue, we develop a new DP-SGD variant for similarity based loss functions -- in particular the commonly used contrastive loss -- that manipulates gradients of the objective function in a novel way to obtain a senstivity of the summed gradient that is $O(1)$ for batch size $n$. We test our DP-SGD variant on some preliminary CIFAR-10 pre-training and CIFAR-100 finetuning tasks and show that, in both tasks, our method's performance comes close to that of a non-private model and generally outperforms DP-SGD applied directly to the contrastive loss.

With the introduction of ChatGPT, OpenAI made large language models (LLM) accessible to users with limited IT expertise. However, users with no background in natural language processing (NLP) might lack a proper understanding of LLMs. Thus the awareness of their inherent limitations, and therefore will take the systems' output at face value. In this paper, we systematically analyse prompts and the generated responses to identify possible problematic issues with a special focus on gender biases, which users need to be aware of when processing the system's output. We explore how ChatGPT reacts in English and German if prompted to answer from a female, male, or neutral perspective. In an in-depth investigation, we examine selected prompts and analyse to what extent responses differ if the system is prompted several times in an identical way. On this basis, we show that ChatGPT is indeed useful for helping non-IT users draft texts for their daily work. However, it is absolutely crucial to thoroughly check the system's responses for biases as well as for syntactic and grammatical mistakes.

Characterizing the relationship between neural population activity and behavioral data is a central goal of neuroscience. While latent variable models (LVMs) are successful in describing high-dimensional time-series data, they are typically only designed for a single type of data, making it difficult to identify structure shared across different experimental data modalities. Here, we address this shortcoming by proposing an unsupervised LVM which extracts temporally evolving shared and independent latents for distinct, simultaneously recorded experimental modalities. We do this by combining Gaussian Process Factor Analysis (GPFA), an interpretable LVM for neural spiking data with temporally smooth latent space, with Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders (GP-VAEs), which similarly use a GP prior to characterize correlations in a latent space, but admit rich expressivity due to a deep neural network mapping to observations. We achieve interpretability in our model by partitioning latent variability into components that are either shared between or independent to each modality. We parameterize the latents of our model in the Fourier domain, and show improved latent identification using this approach over standard GP-VAE methods. We validate our model on simulated multi-modal data consisting of Poisson spike counts and MNIST images that scale and rotate smoothly over time. We show that the multi-modal GP-VAE (MM-GPVAE) is able to not only identify the shared and independent latent structure across modalities accurately, but provides good reconstructions of both images and neural rates on held-out trials. Finally, we demonstrate our framework on two real world multi-modal experimental settings: Drosophila whole-brain calcium imaging alongside tracked limb positions, and Manduca sexta spike train measurements from ten wing muscles as the animal tracks a visual stimulus.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have produced state-of-the-art results for image classification tasks. However, they are limited in their ability to handle rotational and viewpoint variations due to information loss in max-pooling layers. Capsule Networks (CapsNets) employ a computationally-expensive iterative process referred to as dynamic routing to address these issues. CapsNets, however, often fall short on complex datasets and require more computational resources than CNNs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Parallel Dynamic Routing CapsNet (PDR-CapsNet), a deeper and more energy-efficient alternative to CapsNet that offers superior performance, less energy consumption, and lower overfitting rates. By leveraging a parallelization strategy, PDR-CapsNet mitigates the computational complexity of CapsNet and increases throughput, efficiently using hardware resources. As a result, we achieve 83.55\% accuracy while requiring 87.26\% fewer parameters, 32.27\% and 47.40\% fewer MACs, and Flops, achieving 3x faster inference and 7.29J less energy consumption on a 2080Ti GPU with 11GB VRAM compared to CapsNet and for the CIFAR-10 dataset.

This paper addresses the distributed online control problem over a network of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems (with possibly unknown dynamics) in the presence of adversarial perturbations. There exists a global network cost that is characterized by a time-varying convex function, which evolves in an adversarial manner and is sequentially and partially observed by local agents. The goal of each agent is to generate a control sequence that can compete with the best centralized control policy in hindsight, which has access to the global cost. This problem is formulated as a regret minimization. For the case of known dynamics, we propose a fully distributed disturbance feedback controller that guarantees a regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T}\log T)$, where $T$ is the time horizon. For the unknown dynamics case, we design a distributed explore-then-commit approach, where in the exploration phase all agents jointly learn the system dynamics, and in the learning phase our proposed control algorithm is applied using each agent system estimate. We establish a regret bound of $O(T^{2/3} \text{poly}(\log T))$ for this setting.

Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it fluctuates around this value. The quantity $2/\eta$ has been called the "edge of stability" based on consideration of a local quadratic approximation of the loss. We perform a similar calculation to arrive at an "edge of stability" for Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a variant of GD which has been shown to improve its generalization. Unlike the case for GD, the resulting SAM-edge depends on the norm of the gradient. Using three deep learning training tasks, we see empirically that SAM operates on the edge of stability identified by this analysis.

Molecular property prediction is a critical task in computational drug discovery. While recent advances in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers have shown to be effective and promising, they face the following limitations: Transformer self-attention does not explicitly consider the underlying molecule structure while GNN feature representation alone is not sufficient to capture granular and hidden interactions and characteristics that distinguish similar molecules. To address these limitations, we propose SYN- FUSION, a novel approach that synergistically combines pre-trained features from GNNs and Transformers. This approach provides a comprehensive molecular representation, capturing both the global molecule structure and the individual atom characteristics. Experimental results on MoleculeNet benchmarks demonstrate superior performance, surpassing previous models in 5 out of 7 classification datasets and 4 out of 6 regression datasets. The performance of SYN-FUSION has been compared with other Graph-Transformer models that have been jointly trained using a combination of transformer and graph features, and it is found that our approach is on par with those models in terms of performance. Extensive analysis of the learned fusion model across aspects such as loss, latent space, and weight distribution further validates the effectiveness of SYN-FUSION. Finally, an ablation study unequivocally demonstrates that the synergy achieved by SYN-FUSION surpasses the performance of its individual model components and their ensemble, offering a substantial improvement in predicting molecular properties.

Pretrained language models (LMs) encode implicit representations of knowledge in their parameters. However, localizing these representations and disentangling them from each other remains an open problem. In this work, we investigate whether pretrained language models contain various knowledge-critical subnetworks: particular sparse computational subgraphs responsible for encoding specific knowledge the model has memorized. We propose a multi-objective differentiable weight masking scheme to discover these subnetworks and show that we can use them to precisely remove specific knowledge from models while minimizing adverse effects on the behavior of the original language model. We demonstrate our method on multiple GPT2 variants, uncovering highly sparse subnetworks (98%+) that are solely responsible for specific collections of relational knowledge. When these subnetworks are removed, the remaining network maintains most of its initial capacity (modeling language and other memorized relational knowledge) but struggles to express the removed knowledge, and suffers performance drops on examples needing this removed knowledge on downstream tasks after finetuning.

Accurate quantification of model uncertainty has long been recognized as a fundamental requirement for trusted AI. In regression tasks, uncertainty is typically quantified using prediction intervals calibrated to an ad-hoc operating point, making evaluation and comparison across different studies relatively difficult. Our work leverages: (1) the concept of operating characteristics curves and (2) the notion of a gain over a null reference, to derive a novel operating point agnostic assessment methodology for prediction intervals. The paper defines the Uncertainty Characteristics Curve and demonstrates its utility in selected scenarios. We argue that the proposed method addresses the current need for comprehensive assessment of prediction intervals and thus represents a valuable addition to the uncertainty quantification toolbox.

State estimation is the cornerstone of the power system control center since it provides the operating condition of the system in consecutive time intervals. This work investigates the application of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for accelerating power systems state estimation in monitoring the operation of power systems. Traditional state estimation techniques often rely on iterative algorithms that can be computationally intensive, particularly for large-scale power systems. In this paper, a novel approach that leverages the inherent physical knowledge of power systems through the integration of PINNs is proposed. By incorporating physical laws as prior knowledge, the proposed method significantly reduces the computational complexity associated with state estimation while maintaining high accuracy. The proposed method achieves up to 11% increase in accuracy, 75% reduction in standard deviation of results, and 30% faster convergence, as demonstrated by comprehensive experiments on the IEEE 14-bus system.

Patching gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) is an important task in computational pathology. Some methods have been proposed to select a subset of patches as WSI representation for downstream tasks. While most of the computational pathology tasks are designed to classify or detect the presence of pathological lesions in each WSI, the confounding role and redundant nature of normal histology in tissue samples are generally overlooked in WSI representations. In this paper, we propose and validate the concept of an "atlas of normal tissue" solely using samples of WSIs obtained from normal tissue biopsies. Such atlases can be employed to eliminate normal fragments of tissue samples and hence increase the representativeness collection of patches. We tested our proposed method by establishing a normal atlas using 107 normal skin WSIs and demonstrated how established indexes and search engines like Yottixel can be improved. We used 553 WSIs of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) to show the advantage. We also validated our method applied to an external dataset of 451 breast WSIs. The number of selected WSI patches was reduced by 30% to 50% after utilizing the proposed normal atlas while maintaining the same indexing and search performance in leave-one-patinet-out validation for both datasets. We show that the proposed normal atlas shows promise for unsupervised selection of the most representative patches of the abnormal/malignant WSI lesions.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have exhibited remarkable performance in a variety of tasks, but this strong performance often comes with the high expense of using paid API services. In this paper, we are motivated to study building an LLM cascade to save the cost of using LLMs, particularly for performing reasoning (e.g., mathematical, causal) tasks. Our cascade pipeline follows the intuition that simpler questions can be addressed by a weaker but more affordable LLM, whereas only the challenging questions necessitate the stronger and more expensive LLM. To realize this decision-making, we consider the "answer consistency" of the weaker LLM as a signal of the question difficulty and propose several methods for the answer sampling and consistency checking, including one leveraging a mixture of two thought representations (i.e., Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought). Through experiments on six reasoning benchmark datasets, with GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 being the weaker and stronger LLMs, respectively, we demonstrate that our proposed LLM cascades can achieve performance comparable to using solely the stronger LLM but require only 40% of its cost.

Optical neural architectures (ONAs) use coding elements with optimized physical parameters to perform intelligent measurements. However, fabricating ONAs while maintaining design performances is challenging. Limitations in fabrication techniques often limit the realizable precision of the trained parameters. Physical constraints may also limit the range of values the physical parameters can hold. Thus, ONAs should be trained within the implementable constraints. However, such physics-based constraints reduce the training objective to a constrained optimization problem, making it harder to optimize with existing gradient-based methods. To alleviate these critical issues that degrade performance from simulation to realization we propose a physics-informed quantization-aware training framework. Our approach accounts for the physical constraints during the training process, leading to robust designs. We evaluate our approach on an ONA proposed in the literature, named a diffractive deep neural network (D2NN), for all-optical phase imaging and for classification of phase objects. With extensive experiments on different quantization levels and datasets, we show that our approach leads to ONA designs that are robust to quantization noise.

In this study, we explore the applications of random matrix theory (RMT) in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), focusing on layer pruning to simplify DNN architecture and loss landscape. RMT, recently used to address overfitting in deep learning, enables the examination of DNN's weight layer spectra. We use these techniques to optimally determine the number of singular values to be removed from the weight layers of a DNN during training via singular value decomposition (SVD). This process aids in DNN simplification and accuracy enhancement, as evidenced by training simple DNN models on the MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets. Our method can be applied to any fully connected or convolutional layer of a pretrained DNN, decreasing the layer's parameters and simplifying the DNN architecture while preserving or even enhancing the model's accuracy. By discarding small singular values based on RMT criteria, the accuracy of the test set remains consistent, facilitating more efficient DNN training without compromising performance. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting our claim that the elimination of small singular values based on RMT does not negatively impact the DNN's accuracy. Our results offer valuable insights into the practical application of RMT for the creation of more efficient and accurate deep-learning models.

The Cadenza project aims to enhance the audio quality of music for individuals with hearing loss. As part of this, the project is organizing the ICASSP SP Cadenza Challenge: Music Demixing/Remixing for Hearing Aids. The challenge can be tackled by decomposing the music at the hearing aid microphones into vocals, bass, drums, and other components. These can then be intelligently remixed in a personalized manner to improve audio quality. Alternatively, an end-to-end approach could be used. Processes need to consider the music itself, the gain applied to each component, and the listener's hearing loss. The submitted entries will be evaluated using the intrusive objective metric, the Hearing Aid Audio Quality Index (HAAQI). This paper outlines the challenge.

Safe exploration is essential for the practical use of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a generalized safe exploration (GSE) problem as a unified formulation of common safe exploration problems. We then propose a solution of the GSE problem in the form of a meta-algorithm for safe exploration, MASE, which combines an unconstrained RL algorithm with an uncertainty quantifier to guarantee safety in the current episode while properly penalizing unsafe explorations before actual safety violation to discourage them in future episodes. The advantage of MASE is that we can optimize a policy while guaranteeing with a high probability that no safety constraint will be violated under proper assumptions. Specifically, we present two variants of MASE with different constructions of the uncertainty quantifier: one based on generalized linear models with theoretical guarantees of safety and near-optimality, and another that combines a Gaussian process to ensure safety with a deep RL algorithm to maximize the reward. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm achieves better performance than state-of-the-art algorithms on grid-world and Safety Gym benchmarks without violating any safety constraints, even during training.

We seek to automate the generation of drug-like compounds conditioned to specific protein pocket targets. Most current methods approximate the protein-molecule distribution of a finite dataset and, therefore struggle to generate molecules with significant binding improvement over the training dataset. We instead frame the pocket-conditioned molecular generation task as an RL problem and develop TacoGFN, a target conditional Generative Flow Network model. Our method is explicitly encouraged to generate molecules with desired properties as opposed to fitting on a pre-existing data distribution. To this end, we develop transformer-based docking score prediction to speed up docking score computation and propose TacoGFN to explore molecule space efficiently. Furthermore, we incorporate several rounds of active learning where generated samples are queried using a docking oracle to improve the docking score prediction. This approach allows us to accurately explore as much of the molecule landscape as we can afford computationally. Empirically, molecules generated using TacoGFN and its variants significantly outperform all baseline methods across every property (Docking score, QED, SA, Lipinski), while being orders of magnitude faster.

Over the past decade, machine learning has demonstrated impressive results, often surpassing human capabilities in sensing tasks relevant to autonomous flight. Unlike traditional aerospace software, the parameters of machine learning models are not hand-coded nor derived from physics but learned from data. They are automatically adjusted during a training phase, and their values do not usually correspond to physical requirements. As a result, requirements cannot be directly traced to lines of code, hindering the current bottom-up aerospace certification paradigm. This paper attempts to address this gap by 1) demystifying the inner workings and processes to build machine learning models, 2) formally establishing theoretical guarantees given by those processes, and 3) complementing these formal elements with practical considerations to develop a complete certification argument for safety-critical machine learning systems. Based on a scalable statistical verifier, our proposed framework is model-agnostic and tool-independent, making it adaptable to many use cases in the industry. We demonstrate results on a widespread application in autonomous flight: vision-based landing.

Property prediction on molecular graphs is an important application of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Recently, unlabeled molecular data has become abundant, which facilitates the rapid development of self-supervised learning for GNNs in the chemical domain. In this work, we propose pretraining GNNs at the fragment level, which serves as a promising middle ground to overcome the limitations of node-level and graph-level pretraining. Borrowing techniques from recent work on principle subgraph mining, we obtain a compact vocabulary of prevalent fragments that span a large pretraining dataset. From the extracted vocabulary, we introduce several fragment-based contrastive and predictive pretraining tasks. The contrastive learning task jointly pretrains two different GNNs: one based on molecular graphs and one based on fragment graphs, which represents high-order connectivity within molecules. By enforcing the consistency between the fragment embedding and the aggregated embedding of the corresponding atoms from the molecular graphs, we ensure that both embeddings capture structural information at multiple resolutions. The structural information of the fragment graphs is further exploited to extract auxiliary labels for the graph-level predictive pretraining. We employ both the pretrained molecular-based and fragment-based GNNs for downstream prediction, thus utilizing the fragment information during finetuning. Our models advance the performances on 5 out of 8 common molecular benchmarks and improve the performances on long-range biological benchmarks by at least 11.5%.

The symmetry and geometry of input data are considered to be encoded in the internal data representation inside the neural network, but the specific encoding rule has been less investigated. By focusing on a joint group invariant function on the data-parameter domain, we present a systematic rule to find a dual group action on the parameter domain from a group action on the data domain. Further, we introduce generalized neural networks induced from the joint invariant functions, and present a new group theoretic proof of their universality theorems by using Schur's lemma. Since traditional universality theorems were demonstrated based on functional analytical methods, this study sheds light on the group theoretic aspect of the approximation theory, connecting geometric deep learning to abstract harmonic analysis.

With the emergence of Transformer architectures and their powerful understanding of textual data, a new horizon has opened up to predict the molecular properties based on text description. While SMILES are the most common form of representation, they are lacking robustness, rich information and canonicity, which limit their effectiveness in becoming generalizable representations. Here, we present GPT-MolBERTa, a self-supervised large language model (LLM) which uses detailed textual descriptions of molecules to predict their properties. A text based description of 326000 molecules were collected using ChatGPT and used to train LLM to learn the representation of molecules. To predict the properties for the downstream tasks, both BERT and RoBERTa models were used in the finetuning stage. Experiments show that GPT-MolBERTa performs well on various molecule property benchmarks, and approaching state of the art performance in regression tasks. Additionally, further analysis of the attention mechanisms show that GPT-MolBERTa is able to pick up important information from the input textual data, displaying the interpretability of the model.

Interactive search can provide a better experience by incorporating interaction feedback from the users. This can significantly improve search accuracy as it helps avoid irrelevant information and captures the users' search intents. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems use reinforcement learning (RL) models to incorporate the interactions but focus on item-level feedback, ignoring the fine-grained information found in sentence-level feedback. Yet such feedback requires extensive RL action space exploration and large amounts of annotated data. This work addresses these challenges by proposing a new deep Q-learning (DQ) approach, DQrank. DQrank adapts BERT-based models, the SOTA in natural language processing, to select crucial sentences based on users' engagement and rank the items to obtain more satisfactory responses. We also propose two mechanisms to better explore optimal actions. DQrank further utilizes the experience replay mechanism in DQ to store the feedback sentences to obtain a better initial ranking performance. We validate the effectiveness of DQrank on three search datasets. The results show that DQRank performs at least 12% better than the previous SOTA RL approaches. We also conduct detailed ablation studies. The ablation results demonstrate that each model component can efficiently extract and accumulate long-term engagement effects from the users' sentence-level feedback. This structure offers new technologies with promised performance to construct a search system with sentence-level interaction.

Chemical mixtures, satisfying multi-objective performance metrics and constraints, enable their use in chemical processes and electrochemical devices. In this work, we develop a differentiable chemical-physics framework for modeling chemical mixtures, DiffMix, where geometric deep learning (GDL) is leveraged to map from molecular species, compositions and environment conditions, to physical coefficients in the mixture physics laws. In particular, we extend mixture thermodynamic and transport laws by creating learnable physical coefficients, where we use graph neural networks as the molecule encoder and enforce component-wise permutation-invariance. We start our model evaluations with thermodynamics of binary mixtures, and further benchmarked multicomponent electrolyte mixtures on their transport properties, in order to test the model generalizability. We show improved prediction accuracy and model robustness of DiffMix than its purely data-driven variants. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficient optimization of electrolyte transport properties, built on the gradient obtained using DiffMix auto-differentiation. Our simulation runs are then backed up by the data generated by a robotic experimentation setup, Clio. By combining mixture physics and GDL, DiffMix expands the predictive modeling methods for chemical mixtures and provides low-cost optimization approaches in large chemical spaces.

A modified LAB algorithm is introduced in this paper. It builds upon the original LAB algorithm (Reddy et al. 2023), which is a socio-inspired algorithm that models competitive and learning behaviours within a group, establishing hierarchical roles. The proposed algorithm incorporates the roulette wheel approach and a reduction factor introducing inter-group competition and iteratively narrowing down the sample space. The algorithm is validated by solving the benchmark test problems from CEC 2005 and CEC 2017. The solutions are validated using standard statistical tests such as two-sided and pairwise signed rank Wilcoxon test and Friedman rank test. The algorithm exhibited improved and superior robustness as well as search space exploration capabilities. Furthermore, a Clustering-Based Search Space Reduction (C-SSR) method is proposed, making the algorithm capable to solve constrained problems. The C-SSR method enables the algorithm to identify clusters of feasible regions, satisfying the constraints and contributing to achieve the optimal solution. This method demonstrates its effectiveness as a potential alternative to traditional constraint handling techniques. The results obtained using the Modified LAB algorithm are then compared with those achieved by other recent metaheuristic algorithms.

Frequent modifications of unit test cases are inevitable due to software's continuous underlying changes in source code, design, and requirements. Since manually maintaining software test suites is tedious, timely, and costly, automating the process of generation and maintenance of test units will significantly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing processes. To this end, we propose an automated approach which exploits both structural and semantic properties of source code methods and test cases to recommend the most relevant and useful unit tests to the developers. The proposed approach initially trains a neural network to transform method-level source code, as well as unit tests, into distributed representations (embedded vectors) while preserving the importance of the structure in the code. Retrieving the semantic and structural properties of a given method, the approach computes cosine similarity between the method's embedding and the previously-embedded training instances. Further, according to the similarity scores between the embedding vectors, the model identifies the closest methods of embedding and the associated unit tests as the most similar recommendations. The results on the Methods2Test dataset showed that, while there is no guarantee to have similar relevant test cases for the group of similar methods, the proposed approach extracts the most similar existing test cases for a given method in the dataset, and evaluations show that recommended test cases decrease the developers' effort to generating expected test cases.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a powerful framework for representing and integrating complex biomedical information. However, assembling KGs from diverse sources remains a significant challenge in several aspects, including entity alignment, scalability, and the need for continuous updates to keep pace with scientific advancements. Moreover, the representative power of KGs is often limited by the scarcity of multi-modal data integration. To overcome these challenges, we propose Know2BIO, a general-purpose heterogeneous KG benchmark for the biomedical domain. Know2BIO integrates data from 30 diverse sources, capturing intricate relationships across 11 biomedical categories. It currently consists of ~219,000 nodes and ~6,200,000 edges. Know2BIO is capable of user-directed automated updating to reflect the latest knowledge in biomedical science. Furthermore, Know2BIO is accompanied by multi-modal data: node features including text descriptions, protein and compound sequences and structures, enabling the utilization of emerging natural language processing methods and multi-modal data integration strategies. We evaluate KG representation models on Know2BIO, demonstrating its effectiveness as a benchmark for KG representation learning in the biomedical field. Data and source code of Know2BIO are available at https://github.com/Yijia-Xiao/Know2BIO/.

The popularity of pre-trained large models has revolutionized downstream tasks across diverse fields, such as language, vision, and multi-modality. To minimize the adaption cost for downstream tasks, many Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques are proposed for language and 2D image pre-trained models. However, the specialized PEFT method for 3D pre-trained models is still under-explored. To this end, we introduce Point-PEFT, a novel framework for adapting point cloud pre-trained models with minimal learnable parameters. Specifically, for a pre-trained 3D model, we freeze most of its parameters, and only tune the newly added PEFT modules on downstream tasks, which consist of a Point-prior Prompt and a Geometry-aware Adapter. The Point-prior Prompt adopts a set of learnable prompt tokens, for which we propose to construct a memory bank with domain-specific knowledge, and utilize a parameter-free attention to enhance the prompt tokens. The Geometry-aware Adapter aims to aggregate point cloud features within spatial neighborhoods to capture fine-grained geometric information through local interactions. Extensive experiments indicate that our Point-PEFT can achieve better performance than the full fine-tuning on various downstream tasks, while using only 5% of the trainable parameters, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/EvenJoker/Point-PEFT.

We consider the problem of denoising with the help of prior information taken from a database of clean signals or images. Denoising with variational methods is very efficient if a regularizer well adapted to the nature of the data is available. Thanks to the maximum a posteriori Bayesian framework, such regularizer can be systematically linked with the distribution of the data. With deep neural networks (DNN), complex distributions can be recovered from a large training database.To reduce the computational burden of this task, we adapt the compressive learning framework to the learning of regularizers parametrized by DNN. We propose two variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the recovery of deep regularization parameters from a heavily compressed database. These algorithms outperform the initially proposed method that was limited to low-dimensional signals, each iteration using information from the whole database. They also benefit from classical SGD convergence guarantees. Thanks to these improvements we show that this method can be applied for patch based image denoising.}

IoT (Internet of Things) refers to the network of interconnected physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with sensors, software, and connectivity, enabling them to collect and exchange data. IoT Forensics is collecting and analyzing digital evidence from IoT devices to investigate cybercrimes, security breaches, and other malicious activities that may have taken place on these connected devices. In particular, EM-SCA has become an essential tool for IoT forensics due to its ability to reveal confidential information about the internal workings of IoT devices without interfering these devices or wiretapping their networks. However, the accuracy and reliability of EM-SCA results can be limited by device variability, environmental factors, and data collection and processing methods. Besides, there is very few research on these limitations that affects significantly the accuracy of EM-SCA approaches for the crossed-IoT device portability as well as limited research on the possible solutions to address such challenge. Therefore, this empirical study examines the impact of device variability on the accuracy and reliability of EM-SCA approaches, in particular machine-learning (ML) based approaches for EM-SCA. We firstly presents the background, basic concepts and techniques used to evaluate the limitations of current EM-SCA approaches and datasets. Our study then addresses one of the most important limitation, which is caused by the multi-core architecture of the processors (SoC). We present an approach to collect the EM-SCA datasets and demonstrate the feasibility of using transfer learning to obtain more meaningful and reliable results from EM-SCA in IoT forensics of crossed-IoT devices. Our study moreover contributes a new dataset for using deep learning models in analysing Electromagnetic Side-Channel data with regards to the cross-device portability matter.

We aim to improve the Inverted Neural Radiance Fields (iNeRF) algorithm which defines the image pose estimation problem as a NeRF based iterative linear optimization. NeRFs are novel neural space representation models that can synthesize photorealistic novel views of real-world scenes or objects. Our contributions are as follows: we extend the localization optimization objective with a depth-based loss function, we introduce a multi-image based loss function where a sequence of images with known relative poses are used without increasing the computational complexity, we omit hierarchical sampling during volumetric rendering, meaning only the coarse model is used for pose estimation, and we how that by extending the sampling interval convergence can be achieved even or higher initial pose estimate errors. With the proposed modifications the convergence speed is significantly improved, and the basin of convergence is substantially extended.

Visual planning simulates how humans make decisions to achieve desired goals in the form of searching for visual causal transitions between an initial visual state and a final visual goal state. It has become increasingly important in egocentric vision with its advantages in guiding agents to perform daily tasks in complex environments. In this paper, we propose an interpretable and generalizable visual planning framework consisting of i) a novel Substitution-based Concept Learner (SCL) that abstracts visual inputs into disentangled concept representations, ii) symbol abstraction and reasoning that performs task planning via the self-learned symbols, and iii) a Visual Causal Transition model (ViCT) that grounds visual causal transitions to semantically similar real-world actions. Given an initial state, we perform goal-conditioned visual planning with a symbolic reasoning method fueled by the learned representations and causal transitions to reach the goal state. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we collect a large-scale visual planning dataset based on AI2-THOR, dubbed as CCTP. Extensive experiments on this challenging dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our method in visual task planning. Empirically, we show that our framework can generalize to unseen task trajectories and unseen object categories.

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can adaptively select the most effective exploration strategy over time to realize a relevant exploration-exploitation trade-off for each given task. The effectiveness of the proposed exploration framework is demonstrated by various experiments in the MiniGrid and Atari environments.

We propose conditional flows of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) with the negative distance kernel for posterior sampling and conditional generative modeling. This MMD, which is also known as energy distance, has several advantageous properties like efficient computation via slicing and sorting. We approximate the joint distribution of the ground truth and the observations using discrete Wasserstein gradient flows and establish an error bound for the posterior distributions. Further, we prove that our particle flow is indeed a Wasserstein gradient flow of an appropriate functional. The power of our method is demonstrated by numerical examples including conditional image generation and inverse problems like superresolution, inpainting and computed tomography in low-dose and limited-angle settings.

In-context learning (ICL) is an astonishing emergent ability of large language models (LLMs). By presenting a prompt that includes multiple input-output pairs as examples and introducing a new query input, models can generate the corresponding output. However, the performance of models heavily relies on the quality of the input prompt when implementing in-context learning. Biased or imbalanced input prompts can significantly degrade the performance of language models. To address this issue, we introduce a reweighted algorithm called RICL (Reweighted In-context Learning). This algorithm fine-tunes language models using an unbiased validation set to determine the optimal weight for each input-output example to approximate unbiased in-context learning. Furthermore, we also introduce a low-cost reweighted algorithm, a linear optimal weight approximation algorithm called LARICL (Linear Approximation of Reweighted In-context Learning). This algorithm requires minimal training cost while providing effective results. We prove the convergence of our algorithm and validate its performance through experiments conducted on a numerical dataset. The experimental findings reveal a substantial improvement in comparison to benchmarks including the performance of casual prompt-based in-context learning and the performance of a classic fine-tuning method.

The number of local model-agnostic explanation techniques proposed has grown rapidly recently. One main reason is that the bar for developing new explainability techniques is low due to the lack of optimal evaluation measures. Without rigorous measures, it is hard to have concrete evidence of whether the new explanation techniques can significantly outperform their predecessors. Our study proposes a new taxonomy for evaluating local explanations: robustness, evaluation using ground truth from synthetic datasets and interpretable models, model randomization, and human-grounded evaluation. Using this proposed taxonomy, we highlight that all categories of evaluation methods, except those based on the ground truth from interpretable models, suffer from a problem we call the "blame problem." In our study, we argue that this category of evaluation measure is a more reasonable method for evaluating local model-agnostic explanations. However, we show that even this category of evaluation measures has further limitations. The evaluation of local explanations remains an open research problem.

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a popular unsupervised graph representation learning method. However, it has been shown that GCL is vulnerable to adversarial attacks on both the graph structure and node attributes. Although empirical approaches have been proposed to enhance the robustness of GCL, the certifiable robustness of GCL is still remain unexplored. In this paper, we develop the first certifiably robust framework in GCL. Specifically, we first propose a unified criteria to evaluate and certify the robustness of GCL. We then introduce a novel technique, RES (Randomized Edgedrop Smoothing), to ensure certifiable robustness for any GCL model, and this certified robustness can be provably preserved in downstream tasks. Furthermore, an effective training method is proposed for robust GCL. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in providing effective certifiable robustness and enhancing the robustness of any GCL model. The source code of RES is available at https://github.com/ventr1c/RES-GCL.

Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human values, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude, and PaLM are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks on LLMs. Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense first randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs. SmoothLLM reduces the attack success rate on numerous popular LLMs to below one percentage point, avoids unnecessary conservatism, and admits provable guarantees on attack mitigation. Moreover, our defense uses exponentially fewer queries than existing attacks and is compatible with any LLM.

Brain tumors pose significant health challenges worldwide, with glioblastoma being one of the most aggressive forms. Accurate determination of the O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter methylation status is crucial for personalized treatment strategies. However, traditional methods are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel multi-modal approach, BTDNet, leveraging multi-parametric MRI scans, including FLAIR, T1w, T1wCE, and T2 3D volumes, to predict MGMT promoter methylation status. BTDNet addresses two main challenges: the variable volume lengths (i.e., each volume consists of a different number of slices) and the volume-level annotations (i.e., the whole 3D volume is annotated and not the independent slices that it consists of). BTDNet consists of four components: i) the data augmentation one (that performs geometric transformations, convex combinations of data pairs and test-time data augmentation); ii) the 3D analysis one (that performs global analysis through a CNN-RNN); iii) the routing one (that contains a mask layer that handles variable input feature lengths), and iv) the modality fusion one (that effectively enhances data representation, reduces ambiguities and mitigates data scarcity). The proposed method outperforms by large margins the state-of-the-art methods in the RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Challenge, offering a promising avenue for enhancing brain tumor diagnosis and treatment.

Otago Exercise Program (OEP) is a rehabilitation program for older adults to improve frailty, sarcopenia, and balance. Accurate monitoring of patient involvement in OEP is challenging, as self-reports (diaries) are often unreliable. With the development of wearable sensors, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems using wearable sensors have revolutionized healthcare. However, their usage for OEP still shows limited performance. The objective of this study is to build an unobtrusive and accurate system to monitor OEP for older adults. Data was collected from older adults wearing a single waist-mounted Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Two datasets were collected, one in a laboratory setting, and one at the homes of the patients. A hierarchical system is proposed with two stages: 1) using a deep learning model to recognize whether the patients are performing OEP or activities of daily life (ADLs) using a 10-minute sliding window; 2) based on stage 1, using a 6-second sliding window to recognize the OEP sub-classes performed. The results showed that in stage 1, OEP could be recognized with window-wise f1-scores over 0.95 and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) f1-scores over 0.85 for both datasets. In stage 2, for the home scenario, four activities could be recognized with f1-scores over 0.8: ankle plantarflexors, abdominal muscles, knee bends, and sit-to-stand. The results showed the potential of monitoring the compliance of OEP using a single IMU in daily life. Also, some OEP sub-classes are possible to be recognized for further analysis.

The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning models; however, its adoption in econometrics and finance is limited. This paper discusses the extent to which Variational Inference constitutes a reliable and feasible alternative to Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian inference in GARCH-like models. Through a large-scale experiment involving the constituents of the S&P 500 index, several Variational Inference optimizers, a variety of volatility models, and a case study, we show that Variational Inference is an attractive, remarkably well-calibrated, and competitive method for Bayesian learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few demonstrations, known as in-context examples, without adding more or updating existing model parameters. This in-context learning (ICL) capability of LLMs is intriguing, and it is not yet fully understood how pretrained LLMs acquire such capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the reason why a transformer-based language model can accomplish in-context learning after pre-training on a general language corpus by proposing one hypothesis that LLMs can simulate kernel regression with internal representations when faced with in-context examples. More concretely, we first prove that Bayesian inference on in-context prompts can be asymptotically understood as kernel regression $\hat y = \sum_i y_i K(x, x_i)/\sum_i K(x, x_i)$ as the number of in-context demonstrations grows. Then, we empirically investigate the in-context behaviors of language models. We find that during ICL, the attention and hidden features in LLMs match the behaviors of a kernel regression. Finally, our theory provides insights into multiple phenomena observed in the ICL field: why retrieving demonstrative samples similar to test samples can help, why ICL performance is sensitive to the output formats, and why ICL accuracy benefits from selecting in-distribution and representative samples.

Variational dimensionality reduction methods are known for their high accuracy, generative abilities, and robustness. These methods have many theoretical justifications. Here we introduce a unifying principle rooted in information theory to rederive and generalize existing variational methods and design new ones. We base our framework on an interpretation of the multivariate information bottleneck, in which two Bayesian networks are traded off against one another. We interpret the first network as an encoder graph, which specifies what information to keep when compressing the data. We interpret the second network as a decoder graph, which specifies a generative model for the data. Using this framework, we rederive existing dimensionality reduction methods such as the deep variational information bottleneck (DVIB), beta variational auto-encoders (beta-VAE), and deep variational canonical correlation analysis (DVCCA). The framework naturally introduces a trade-off parameter between compression and reconstruction in the DVCCA family of algorithms, resulting in the new beta-DVCCA family. In addition, we derive a new variational dimensionality reduction method, deep variational symmetric informational bottleneck (DVSIB), which simultaneously compresses two variables to preserve information between their compressed representations. We implement all of these algorithms and evaluate their ability to produce shared low dimensional latent spaces on a modified noisy MNIST dataset. We show that algorithms that are better matched to the structure of the data (beta-DVCCA and DVSIB) produce better latent spaces as measured by classification accuracy and the dimensionality of the latent variables. We believe that this framework can be used to unify other multi-view representation learning algorithms. Additionally, it provides a straightforward framework for deriving problem-specific loss functions.

It is well known that canonical recurrent neural networks (RNNs) face limitations in learning long-term dependencies which have been addressed by memory structures in long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Neural Turing machines (NTMs) are novel RNNs that implement the notion of programmable computers with neural network controllers that can learn simple algorithmic tasks. Matrix neural networks feature matrix representation which inherently preserves the spatial structure of data when compared to canonical neural networks that use vector-based representation. One may then argue that neural networks with matrix representations may have the potential to provide better memory capacity. In this paper, we define and study a probabilistic notion of memory capacity based on Fisher information for matrix-based RNNs. We find bounds on memory capacity for such networks under various hypotheses and compare them with their vector counterparts. In particular, we show that the memory capacity of such networks is bounded by $N^2$ for $N\times N$ state matrix which generalizes the one known for vector networks. We also show and analyze the increase in memory capacity for such networks which is introduced when one exhibits an external state memory, such as NTMs. Consequently, we construct NTMs with RNN controllers with matrix-based representation of external memory, leading us to introduce Matrix NTMs. We demonstrate the performance of this class of memory networks under certain algorithmic learning tasks such as copying and recall and compare it with Matrix RNNs. We find an improvement in the performance of Matrix NTMs by the addition of external memory, in comparison to Matrix RNNs.

(Abridged) Carmosino et al. (2016) demonstrated that natural proofs of circuit lower bounds for \Lambda imply efficient algorithms for learning \Lambda-circuits, but only over the uniform distribution, with membership queries, and provided \AC^0[p] \subseteq \Lambda. We consider whether this implication can be generalized to \Lambda \not\supseteq \AC^0[p], and to learning algorithms in Valiant's PAC model, which use only random examples and learn over arbitrary example distributions. We give results of both positive and negative flavor. On the negative side, we observe that if, for every circuit class \Lambda, the implication from natural proofs for \Lambda to learning \Lambda-circuits in Valiant's PAC model holds, then there is a polynomial time solution to O(n^{1.5})-uSVP (unique Shortest Vector Problem), and polynomial time quantum solutions to O(n^{1.5})-SVP (Shortest Vector Problem) and O(n^{1.5})-SIVP (Shortest Independent Vector Problem). This indicates that whether natural proofs for \Lambda imply efficient learning algorithms for \Lambda in Valiant's PAC model may depend on \Lambda. On the positive side, our main result is that specific natural proofs arising from a type of communication complexity argument (e.g., Nisan (1993), for depth-2 majority circuits) imply PAC-learning algorithms in a new distributional variant of Valiant's model. Our distributional PAC model is stronger than the average-case prediction model of Blum et al (1993) and the heuristic PAC model of Nanashima (2021), and has several important properties which make it of independent interest, such as being boosting-friendly. The main applications of our result are new distributional PAC-learning algorithms for depth-2 majority circuits, polytopes and DNFs over natural target distributions, as well as the nonexistence of encoded-input weak PRFs that can be evaluated by depth-2 majority circuits.

Over-the-Air (OtA) Federated Learning (FL) refers to an FL system where multiple agents apply OtA computation for transmitting model updates to a common edge server. Two important features of OtA computation, namely linear processing and signal-level superposition, motivate the use of linear compression with compressed sensing (CS) methods to reduce the number of data samples transmitted over the channel. The previous works on applying CS methods in OtA FL have primarily assumed that the original model update vectors are sparse, or they have been sparsified before compression. However, it is unclear whether linear compression with CS-based reconstruction is more effective than directly sending the non-zero elements in the sparsified update vectors, under the same total power constraint. In this study, we examine and compare several communication designs with or without sparsification. Our findings demonstrate that sparsification before compression is not necessary. Alternatively, sparsification without linear compression can also achieve better performance than the commonly considered setup that combines both.

Being able to identify functions of interest in cross-architecture software is useful whether you are analysing for malware, securing the software supply chain or conducting vulnerability research. Cross-Architecture Binary Code Similarity Search has been explored in numerous studies and has used a wide range of different data sources to achieve its goals. The data sources typically used draw on common structures derived from binaries such as function control flow graphs or binary level call graphs, the output of the disassembly process or the outputs of a dynamic analysis approach. One data source which has received less attention is binary intermediate representations. Binary Intermediate representations possess two interesting properties: they are cross architecture by their very nature and encode the semantics of a function explicitly to support downstream usage. Within this paper we propose Function as a String Encoded Representation (FASER) which combines long document transformers with the use of intermediate representations to create a model capable of cross architecture function search without the need for manual feature engineering, pre-training or a dynamic analysis step. We compare our approach against a series of baseline approaches for two tasks; A general function search task and a targeted vulnerability search task. Our approach demonstrates strong performance across both tasks, performing better than all baseline approaches.

Increasing the context length of large language models (LLMs) unlocks fundamentally new capabilities, but also significantly increases the memory footprints of training. Previous model-parallel systems such as Megatron-LM partition and compute different attention heads in parallel, resulting in large communication volumes, so they cannot scale beyond the number of attention heads, thereby hindering its adoption. In this paper, we introduce a new approach, LightSeq, for long-context LLMs training. LightSeq has many notable advantages. First, LightSeq partitions over the sequence dimension, hence is agnostic to model architectures and readily applicable for models with varying numbers of attention heads, such as Multi-Head, Multi-Query and Grouped-Query attention. Second, LightSeq not only requires up to 4.7x less communication than Megatron-LM on popular LLMs but also overlaps the communication with computation. To further reduce the training time, LightSeq features a novel gradient checkpointing scheme to bypass an forward computation for memory-efficient attention. We evaluate LightSeq on Llama-7B and its variants with sequence lengths from 32K to 512K. Through comprehensive experiments on single and cross-node training, we show that LightSeq achieves up to 1.24-2.01x end-to-end speedup, and a 2-8x longer sequence length on models with fewer heads, compared to Megatron-LM. Codes will be available at https://github.com/RulinShao/LightSeq.

Inspired by recent developments in attention models for image classification and natural language processing, we present various Attention based architectures in reinforcement learning (RL) domain, capable of performing well on OpenAI Gym Atari-2600 game suite. In spite of the recent success of Deep Reinforcement learning techniques in various fields like robotics, gaming and healthcare, they suffer from a major drawback that neural networks are difficult to interpret. We try to get around this problem with the help of Attention based models. In Attention based models, extracting and overlaying of attention map onto images allows for direct observation of information used by agent to select actions and easier interpretation of logic behind the chosen actions. Our models in addition to playing well on gym-Atari environments, also provide insights on how agent perceives its environment. In addition, motivated by recent developments in attention based video-classification models using Vision Transformer, we come up with an architecture based on Vision Transformer, for image-based RL domain too. Compared to previous works in Vision Transformer, our model is faster to train and requires fewer computational resources. 3

Machine learning, and representation learning in particular, has the potential to facilitate drug discovery by screening a large chemical space in silico. A successful approach for representing molecules is to treat them as a graph and utilize graph neural networks. One of the key limitations of such methods is the necessity to represent compounds with different numbers of atoms, which requires aggregating the atom's information. Common aggregation operators, such as averaging, result in loss of information at the atom level. In this work, we propose a novel aggregating approach where each atom is weighted non-linearly using the Boltzmann distribution with a hyperparameter analogous to temperature. We show that using this weighted aggregation improves the ability of the gold standard message-passing neural network to predict antibiotic activity. Moreover, by changing the temperature hyperparameter, our approach can reveal the atoms that are important for activity prediction in a smooth and consistent way, thus providing a novel, regulated attention mechanism for graph neural networks. We further validate our method by showing that it recapitulates the functional group in beta-Lactam antibiotics. The ability of our approach to rank the atoms' importance for a desired function can be used within any graph neural network to provide interpretability of the results and predictions at the node level.

This paper investigates new families of compositional optimization problems, called $\underline{\bf n}$on-$\underline{\bf s}$mooth $\underline{\bf w}$eakly-$\underline{\bf c}$onvex $\underline{\bf f}$inite-sum $\underline{\bf c}$oupled $\underline{\bf c}$ompositional $\underline{\bf o}$ptimization (NSWC FCCO). There has been a growing interest in FCCO due to its wide-ranging applications in machine learning and AI, as well as its ability to address the shortcomings of stochastic algorithms based on empirical risk minimization. However, current research on FCCO presumes that both the inner and outer functions are smooth, limiting their potential to tackle a more diverse set of problems. Our research expands on this area by examining non-smooth weakly-convex FCCO, where the outer function is weakly convex and non-decreasing, and the inner function is weakly-convex. We analyze a single-loop algorithm and establish its complexity for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the Moreau envelop of the objective function. Additionally, we also extend the algorithm to solving novel non-smooth weakly-convex tri-level finite-sum coupled compositional optimization problems, which feature a nested arrangement of three functions. Lastly, we explore the applications of our algorithms in deep learning for two-way partial AUC maximization and multi-instance two-way partial AUC maximization, using empirical studies to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Embedding plays a critical role in modern recommender systems because they are virtual representations of real-world entities and the foundation for subsequent decision models. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding update mechanism, Structure-aware Embedding Evolution (SEvo for short), to encourage related nodes to evolve similarly at each step. Unlike GNN (Graph Neural Network) that typically serves as an intermediate part, SEvo is able to directly inject the graph structure information into embedding with negligible computational overhead in training. The convergence properties of SEvo as well as its possible variants are theoretically analyzed to justify the validity of the designs. Moreover, SEvo can be seamlessly integrated into existing optimizers for state-of-the-art performance. In particular, SEvo-enhanced AdamW with moment estimate correction demonstrates consistent improvements across a spectrum of models and datasets, suggesting a novel technical route to effectively utilize graph structure information beyond explicit GNN modules.

With the blowout development of pre-trained models (PTMs), the efficient tuning of these models for diverse downstream applications has emerged as a pivotal research concern. Although recent investigations into prompt tuning have provided promising avenues, three salient challenges persist: (1) memory constraint: the continuous growth in the size of open-source PTMs renders fine-tuning, even a fraction of their parameters, challenging for many practitioners. (2) model privacy: existing PTMs often function as public API services, with their parameters inaccessible for effective or tailored fine-tuning. (3) data privacy: the fine-tuning of PTMs necessitates high-quality datasets, which are typically localized and not shared to public. To optimally harness each local dataset while navigating memory constraints and preserving privacy, we propose Federated Black-Box Prompt Tuning (Fed-BBPT). This innovative approach eschews reliance on parameter architectures and private dataset access, instead capitalizing on a central server that aids local users in collaboratively training a prompt generator through regular aggregation. Local users leverage API-driven learning via a zero-order optimizer, obviating the need for PTM deployment. Relative to extensive fine-tuning, Fed-BBPT proficiently sidesteps memory challenges tied to PTM storage and fine-tuning on local machines, tapping into comprehensive, high-quality, yet private training datasets. A thorough evaluation across 40 datasets spanning CV and NLP tasks underscores the robustness of our proposed model.

Large Language Models (LLM) and foundation models are popular as they offer new opportunities for individuals and businesses to improve natural language processing, interact with data, and retrieve information faster. However, training or fine-tuning LLMs requires a vast amount of data, which can be challenging to access due to legal or technical restrictions and may require private computing resources. Federated Learning (FL) is a solution designed to overcome these challenges and expand data access for deep learning applications. This paper takes a hardware-centric approach to explore how LLMs can be brought to modern edge computing systems. Our study fine-tunes the FLAN-T5 model family, ranging from 80M to 3B parameters, using FL for a text summarization task. We provide a micro-level hardware benchmark, compare the model FLOP utilization to a state-of-the-art data center GPU, and study the network utilization in realistic conditions. Our contribution is twofold: First, we evaluate the current capabilities of edge computing systems and their potential for LLM FL workloads. Second, by comparing these systems with a data-center GPU, we demonstrate the potential for improvement and the next steps toward achieving greater computational efficiency at the edge.

The Internet of Things (IoT) consistently generates vast amounts of data, sparking increasing concern over the protection of data privacy and the limitation of data misuse. Federated learning (FL) facilitates collaborative capabilities among multiple parties by sharing machine learning (ML) model parameters instead of raw user data, and it has recently gained significant attention for its potential in privacy preservation and learning efficiency enhancement. In this paper, we highlight the digital ethics concerns that arise when human-centric devices serve as clients in FL. More specifically, challenges of game dynamics, fairness, incentive, and continuity arise in FL due to differences in perspectives and objectives between clients and the server. We analyze these challenges and their solutions from the perspectives of both the client and the server, and through the viewpoints of centralized and decentralized FL. Finally, we explore the opportunities in FL for human-centric IoT as directions for future development.

Tabular data prediction is a fundamental machine learning task for many applications. Existing methods predominantly employ discriminative modeling and operate under the assumption of a fixed target column, necessitating re-training for every new predictive task. Inspired by the generative power of large language models (LLMs), this paper exploits the idea of building universal tabular data predictors based on generative modeling, namely UniPredict. Here, we show that scaling up an LLM to extensive tabular datasets with the capability of comprehending diverse tabular inputs and predicting for target variables following the input instructions. Specifically, we train a single LLM on an aggregation of 169 tabular datasets with diverse targets and compare its performance against baselines that are trained on each dataset separately. We observe this versatile UniPredict model demonstrates an advantage over other models, ranging from 5.4% to 13.4%, when compared with the best tree-boosting baseline and the best neural network baseline, respectively. We further test UniPredict in few-shot learning settings on another 62 tabular datasets. Our method achieves strong performance in quickly adapting to new tasks, where our method outperforms XGBoost over 100% on the low-resource setup and shows a significant margin over all baselines. We envision that UniPredict sheds light on developing a universal tabular data prediction system that learns from data at scale and serves a wide range of prediction tasks.

Machine learning plays an important and growing role in molecular simulation. The newest version of the OpenMM molecular dynamics toolkit introduces new features to support the use of machine learning potentials. Arbitrary PyTorch models can be added to a simulation and used to compute forces and energy. A higher-level interface allows users to easily model their molecules of interest with general purpose, pretrained potential functions. A collection of optimized CUDA kernels and custom PyTorch operations greatly improves the speed of simulations. We demonstrate these features on simulations of cyclin-dependent kinase 8 (CDK8) and the green fluorescent protein (GFP) chromophore in water. Taken together, these features make it practical to use machine learning to improve the accuracy of simulations at only a modest increase in cost.

Various data imbalances that naturally arise in a multi-territory personalized recommender system can lead to a significant item bias for globally prevalent items. A locally popular item can be overshadowed by a globally prevalent item. Moreover, users' viewership patterns/statistics can drastically change from one geographic location to another which may suggest to learn specific user embeddings. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning (MTL) technique, along with an adaptive upsampling method to reduce popularity bias in multi-territory recommendations. Our proposed framework is designed to enrich training examples with active users representation through upsampling, and capable of learning geographic-based user embeddings by leveraging MTL. Through experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in multiple territories compared to a baseline not incorporating our proposed techniques.~Noticeably, we show improved relative gain of up to $65.27\%$ in PR-AUC metric. A case study is presented to demonstrate the advantages of our methods in attenuating the popularity bias of global items.

Deep learning has become a powerful tool in computational biology, revolutionising the analysis and interpretation of biological data over time. In our article review, we delve into various aspects of deep learning in computational biology. Specifically, we examine its history, advantages, and challenges. Our focus is on two primary applications: DNA sequence classification and prediction, as well as protein structure prediction from sequence data. Additionally, we provide insights into the outlook for this field. To fully harness the potential of deep learning in computational biology, it is crucial to address the challenges that come with it. These challenges include the requirement for large, labelled datasets and the interpretability of deep learning models. The use of deep learning in the analysis of DNA sequences has brought about a significant transformation in the detection of genomic variants and the analysis of gene expression. This has greatly contributed to the advancement of personalised medicine and drug discovery. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to be highly accurate in predicting genetic variations and gene expression levels. Deep learning techniques are used for analysing epigenetic data, including DNA methylation and histone modifications. This provides valuable insights into metabolic conditions and gene regulation. The field of protein structure prediction has been significantly impacted by deep learning, which has enabled accurate determination of the three-dimensional shape of proteins and prediction of their interactions. The future of deep learning in computational biology looks promising. With the development of advanced deep learning models and interpretation techniques, there is potential to overcome current challenges and further our understanding of biological systems.

Machine scheduling aims to optimize job assignments to machines while adhering to manufacturing rules and job specifications. This optimization leads to reduced operational costs, improved customer demand fulfillment, and enhanced production efficiency. However, machine scheduling remains a challenging combinatorial problem due to its NP-hard nature. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), a key component of artificial general intelligence, has shown promise in various domains like gaming and robotics. Researchers have explored applying DRL to machine scheduling problems since 1995. This paper offers a comprehensive review and comparison of DRL-based approaches, highlighting their methodology, applications, advantages, and limitations. It categorizes these approaches based on computational components: conventional neural networks, encoder-decoder architectures, graph neural networks, and metaheuristic algorithms. Our review concludes that DRL-based methods outperform exact solvers, heuristics, and tabular reinforcement learning algorithms in terms of computation speed and generating near-global optimal solutions. These DRL-based approaches have been successfully applied to static and dynamic scheduling across diverse machine environments and job characteristics. However, DRL-based schedulers face limitations in handling complex operational constraints, configurable multi-objective optimization, generalization, scalability, interpretability, and robustness. Addressing these challenges will be a crucial focus for future research in this field. This paper serves as a valuable resource for researchers to assess the current state of DRL-based machine scheduling and identify research gaps. It also aids experts and practitioners in selecting the appropriate DRL approach for production scheduling.

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in the field of generative modeling due to its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space. However, the common practice of learning latent space EBMs with non-convergent short-run MCMC for prior and posterior sampling is hindering the model from further progress; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice often leads to degraded generation quality and instability in training, especially with highly multi-modal and/or high-dimensional target distributions. To remedy this sampling issue, in this paper we introduce a simple but effective diffusion-based amortization method for long-run MCMC sampling and develop a novel learning algorithm for the latent space EBM based on it. We provide theoretical evidence that the learned amortization of MCMC is a valid long-run MCMC sampler. Experiments on several image modeling benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared with strong counterparts

By now there is substantial evidence that deep learning models learn certain human-interpretable features as part of their internal representations of data. As having the right (or wrong) concepts is critical to trustworthy machine learning systems, it is natural to ask which inputs from the model's original training set were most important for learning a concept at a given layer. To answer this, we combine data attribution methods with methods for probing the concepts learned by a model. Training network and probe ensembles for two concept datasets on a range of network layers, we use the recently developed TRAK method for large-scale data attribution. We find some evidence for convergence, where removing the 10,000 top attributing images for a concept and retraining the model does not change the location of the concept in the network nor the probing sparsity of the concept. This suggests that rather than being highly dependent on a few specific examples, the features that inform the development of a concept are spread in a more diffuse manner across its exemplars, implying robustness in concept formation.

Traditional deep learning (DL) suffers from two core problems. Firstly, it assumes training samples are independent and identically distributed. However, numerous real-world datasets group samples by shared measurements (e.g., study participants or cells), violating this assumption. In these scenarios, DL can show compromised performance, limited generalization, and interpretability issues, coupled with cluster confounding causing Type 1 and 2 errors. Secondly, models are typically trained for overall accuracy, often neglecting underrepresented groups and introducing biases in crucial areas like loan approvals or determining health insurance rates, such biases can significantly impact one's quality of life. To address both of these challenges simultaneously, we present a mixed effects deep learning (MEDL) framework. MEDL separately quantifies cluster-invariant fixed effects (FE) and cluster-specific random effects (RE) through the introduction of: 1) a cluster adversary which encourages the learning of cluster-invariant FE, 2) a Bayesian neural network which quantifies the RE, and a mixing function combining the FE an RE into a mixed-effect prediction. We marry this MEDL with adversarial debiasing, which promotes equality-of-odds fairness across FE, RE, and ME predictions for fairness-sensitive variables. We evaluated our approach using three datasets: two from census/finance focusing on income classification and one from healthcare predicting hospitalization duration, a regression task. Our framework notably enhances fairness across all sensitive variables-increasing fairness up to 82% for age, 43% for race, 86% for sex, and 27% for marital-status. Besides promoting fairness, our method maintains the robust performance and clarity of MEDL. It's versatile, suitable for various dataset types and tasks, making it broadly applicable. Our GitHub repository houses the implementation.

Medical image classification is a critical problem for healthcare, with the potential to alleviate the workload of doctors and facilitate diagnoses of patients. However, two challenges arise when deploying deep learning models to real-world healthcare applications. First, neural models tend to learn spurious correlations instead of desired features, which could fall short when generalizing to new domains (e.g., patients with different ages). Second, these black-box models lack interpretability. When making diagnostic predictions, it is important to understand why a model makes a decision for trustworthy and safety considerations. In this paper, to address these two limitations, we propose a new paradigm to build robust and interpretable medical image classifiers with natural language concepts. Specifically, we first query clinical concepts from GPT-4, then transform latent image features into explicit concepts with a vision-language model. We systematically evaluate our method on eight medical image classification datasets to verify its effectiveness. On challenging datasets with strong confounding factors, our method can mitigate spurious correlations thus substantially outperform standard visual encoders and other baselines. Finally, we show how classification with a small number of concepts brings a level of interpretability for understanding model decisions through case studies in real medical data.

Twitter is currently one of the biggest social media platforms. Its users may share, read, and engage with short posts called tweets. For the ACM Recommender Systems Conference 2020, Twitter published a dataset around 70 GB in size for the annual RecSys Challenge. In 2020, the RecSys Challenge invited participating teams to create models that would predict engagement likelihoods for given user-tweet combinations. The submitted models predicting like, reply, retweet, and quote engagements were evaluated based on two metrics: area under the precision-recall curve (PRAUC) and relative cross-entropy (RCE). In this diploma thesis, we used the RecSys 2020 Challenge dataset and evaluation procedure to investigate how well context alone may be used to predict tweet engagement likelihood. In doing so, we employed the Spark engine on TU Wien's Little Big Data Cluster to create scalable data preprocessing, feature engineering, feature selection, and machine learning pipelines. We manually created just under 200 additional features to describe tweet context. The results indicate that features describing users' prior engagement history and the popularity of hashtags and links in the tweet were the most informative. We also found that factors such as the prediction algorithm, training dataset size, training dataset sampling method, and feature selection significantly affect the results. After comparing the best results of our context-only prediction models with content-only models and with models developed by the Challenge winners, we identified that the context-based models underperformed in terms of the RCE score. This work thus concludes by situating this discrepancy and proposing potential improvements to our implementation, which is shared in a public git repository.

Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is a key component in securing the computer network from various cyber security threats and network attacks. However, consider an unfortunate situation where the NIDS is itself attacked and vulnerable more specifically, we can say, How to defend the defender?. In Adversarial Machine Learning (AML), the malicious actors aim to fool the Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models to produce incorrect predictions with intentionally crafted adversarial examples. These adversarial perturbed examples have become the biggest vulnerability of ML and DL based systems and are major obstacles to their adoption in real-time and mission-critical applications such as NIDS. AML is an emerging research domain, and it has become a necessity for the in-depth study of adversarial attacks and their defence strategies to safeguard the computer network from various cyber security threads. In this research work, we aim to cover important aspects related to NIDS, adversarial attacks and its defence mechanism to increase the robustness of the ML and DL based NIDS. We implemented four powerful adversarial attack techniques, namely, Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), Jacobian Saliency Map Attack (JSMA), Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) and Carlini & Wagner (C&W) in NIDS. We analyzed its performance in terms of various performance metrics in detail. Furthermore, the three heuristics defence strategies, i.e., Adversarial Training (AT), Gaussian Data Augmentation (GDA) and High Confidence (HC), are implemented to improve the NIDS robustness under adversarial attack situations. The complete workflow is demonstrated in real-time network with data packet flow. This research work provides the overall background for the researchers interested in AML and its implementation from a computer network security point of view.

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared model with their local data. Nonetheless, conventional federated learning algorithms often struggle to generalize well due to the ubiquitous domain shift across clients. In this work, we consider a challenging yet realistic federated learning scenario where the training data of each client originates from different domains. We address the challenges of domain shift by leveraging the technique of prompt learning, and propose a novel method called Federated Dual Prompt Tuning (Fed-DPT). Specifically, Fed-DPT employs a pre-trained vision-language model and then applies both visual and textual prompt tuning to facilitate domain adaptation over decentralized data. Extensive experiments of Fed-DPT demonstrate its significant effectiveness in domain-aware federated learning. With a pre-trained CLIP model (ViT-Base as image encoder), the proposed Fed-DPT attains 68.4% average accuracy over six domains in the DomainNet dataset, which improves the original CLIP by a large margin of 14.8%.

We investigate the variational optimality (specifically, the Banach space optimality) of a large class of neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities/activation functions. To that end, we construct a new family of Banach spaces defined via a regularization operator and the $k$-plane transform. We prove a representer theorem that states that the solution sets to learning problems posed over these Banach spaces are completely characterized by neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities. These optimal architectures have skip connections and are tightly connected to orthogonal weight normalization and multi-index models, both of which have received considerable interest in the neural network community. Our framework is compatible with a number of classical nonlinearities including the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, the norm activation function, and the radial basis functions found in the theory of thin-plate/polyharmonic splines. We also show that the underlying spaces are special instances of reproducing kernel Banach spaces and variation spaces. Our results shed light on the regularity of functions learned by neural networks trained on data, particularly with multivariate nonlinearities, and provide new theoretical motivation for several architectural choices found in practice.

Probabilistic modelling of power systems operation and planning processes depends on data-driven methods, which require sufficiently large datasets. When historical data lacks this, it is desired to model the underlying data generation mechanism as a probability distribution to assess the data quality and generate more data, if needed. Kernel density estimation (KDE) based models are popular choices for this task, but they fail to adapt to data regions with varying densities. In this paper, an adaptive KDE model is employed to circumvent this, where each kernel in the model has an individual bandwidth. The leave-one-out maximum log-likelihood (LOO-MLL) criterion is proposed to prevent the singular solutions that the regular MLL criterion gives rise to, and it is proven that LOO-MLL prevents these. Relying on this guaranteed robustness, the model is extended by assigning learnable weights to the kernels. In addition, a modified expectation-maximization algorithm is employed to accelerate the optimization speed reliably. The performance of the proposed method and models are exhibited on two power systems datasets using different statistical tests and by comparison with Gaussian mixture models. Results show that the proposed models have promising performance, in addition to their singularity prevention guarantees.

We propose a federated averaging Langevin algorithm (FA-LD) for uncertainty quantification and mean predictions with distributed clients. In particular, we generalize beyond normal posterior distributions and consider a general class of models. We develop theoretical guarantees for FA-LD for strongly log-concave distributions with non-i.i.d data and study how the injected noise and the stochastic-gradient noise, the heterogeneity of data, and the varying learning rates affect the convergence. Such an analysis sheds light on the optimal choice of local updates to minimize communication costs. Important to our approach is that the communication efficiency does not deteriorate with the injected noise in the Langevin algorithms. In addition, we examine in our FA-LD algorithm both independent and correlated noise used over different clients. We observe there is a trade-off between the pairs among communication, accuracy, and data privacy. As local devices may become inactive in federated networks, we also show convergence results based on different averaging schemes where only partial device updates are available. In such a case, we discover an additional bias that does not decay to zero.

In 1976, Lai constructed a nontrivial confidence sequence for the mean $\mu$ of a Gaussian distribution with unknown variance $\sigma$. Curiously, he employed both an improper (right Haar) mixture over $\sigma$ and an improper (flat) mixture over $\mu$. Here, we elaborate carefully on the details of his construction, which use generalized nonintegrable martingales and an extended Ville's inequality. While this does yield a sequential t-test, it does not yield an ``e-process'' (due to the nonintegrability of his martingale). In this paper, we develop two new e-processes and confidence sequences for the same setting: one is a test martingale in a reduced filtration, while the other is an e-process in the canonical data filtration. These are respectively obtained by swapping Lai's flat mixture for a Gaussian mixture, and swapping the right Haar mixture over $\sigma$ with the maximum likelihood estimate under the null, as done in universal inference. We also analyze the width of resulting confidence sequences, which have a curious dependence on the error probability $\alpha$. Numerical experiments are provided along the way to compare and contrast the various approaches.

Most popular dimension reduction (DR) methods like t-SNE and UMAP are based on minimizing a cost between input and latent pairwise similarities. Though widely used, these approaches lack clear probabilistic foundations to enable a full understanding of their properties and limitations. To that extent, we introduce a unifying statistical framework based on the coupling of hidden graphs using cross entropy. These graphs induce a Markov random field dependency structure among the observations in both input and latent spaces. We show that existing pairwise similarity DR methods can be retrieved from our framework with particular choices of priors for the graphs. Moreover this reveals that these methods suffer from a statistical deficiency that explains poor performances in conserving coarse-grain dependencies. Our model is leveraged and extended to address this issue while new links are drawn with Laplacian eigenmaps and PCA.

Building machines that can reason about physical events and their causal relationships is crucial for flexible interaction with the physical world. However, most existing physical and causal reasoning benchmarks are exclusively based on synthetically generated events and synthetic natural language descriptions of causal relationships. This design brings up two issues. First, there is a lack of diversity in both event types and natural language descriptions; second, causal relationships based on manually-defined heuristics are different from human judgments. To address both shortcomings, we present the CLEVRER-Humans benchmark, a video reasoning dataset for causal judgment of physical events with human labels. We employ two techniques to improve data collection efficiency: first, a novel iterative event cloze task to elicit a new representation of events in videos, which we term Causal Event Graphs (CEGs); second, a data augmentation technique based on neural language generative models. We convert the collected CEGs into questions and answers to be consistent with prior work. Finally, we study a collection of baseline approaches for CLEVRER-Humans question-answering, highlighting the great challenges set forth by our benchmark.

Bayesian optimization is an effective method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. High-dimensional problems are particularly challenging as the surrogate model of the objective suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which makes accurate modeling difficult. We propose a group testing approach to identify active variables to facilitate efficient optimization in these domains. The proposed algorithm, Group Testing Bayesian Optimization (GTBO), first runs a testing phase where groups of variables are systematically selected and tested on whether they influence the objective. To that end, we extend the well-established theory of group testing to functions of continuous ranges. In the second phase, GTBO guides optimization by placing more importance on the active dimensions. By exploiting the axis-aligned subspace assumption, GTBO is competitive against state-of-the-art methods on several synthetic and real-world high-dimensional optimization tasks. Furthermore, GTBO aids in the discovery of active parameters in applications, thereby enhancing practitioners' understanding of the problem at hand.

Surrogate models play a crucial role in retrospectively interpreting complex and powerful black box machine learning models via model distillation. This paper focuses on using model-based trees as surrogate models which partition the feature space into interpretable regions via decision rules. Within each region, interpretable models based on additive main effects are used to approximate the behavior of the black box model, striking for an optimal balance between interpretability and performance. Four model-based tree algorithms, namely SLIM, GUIDE, MOB, and CTree, are compared regarding their ability to generate such surrogate models. We investigate fidelity, interpretability, stability, and the algorithms' capability to capture interaction effects through appropriate splits. Based on our comprehensive analyses, we finally provide an overview of user-specific recommendations.

Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it fluctuates around this value. The quantity $2/\eta$ has been called the "edge of stability" based on consideration of a local quadratic approximation of the loss. We perform a similar calculation to arrive at an "edge of stability" for Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a variant of GD which has been shown to improve its generalization. Unlike the case for GD, the resulting SAM-edge depends on the norm of the gradient. Using three deep learning training tasks, we see empirically that SAM operates on the edge of stability identified by this analysis.

We study the distribution of a fully connected neural network with random Gaussian weights and biases in which the hidden layer widths are proportional to a large constant $n$. Under mild assumptions on the non-linearity, we obtain quantitative bounds on normal approximations valid at large but finite $n$ and any fixed network depth. Our theorems show both for the finite-dimensional distributions and the entire process, that the distance between a random fully connected network (and its derivatives) to the corresponding infinite width Gaussian process scales like $n^{-\gamma}$ for $\gamma>0$, with the exponent depending on the metric used to measure discrepancy. Our bounds are strictly stronger in terms of their dependence on network width than any previously available in the literature; in the one-dimensional case, we also prove that they are optimal, i.e., we establish matching lower bounds.

Sparse deep learning has become a popular technique for improving the performance of deep neural networks in areas such as uncertainty quantification, variable selection, and large-scale network compression. However, most existing research has focused on problems where the observations are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), and there has been little work on the problems where the observations are dependent, such as time series data and sequential data in natural language processing. This paper aims to address this gap by studying the theory for sparse deep learning with dependent data. We show that sparse recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can be consistently estimated, and their predictions are asymptotically normally distributed under appropriate assumptions, enabling the prediction uncertainty to be correctly quantified. Our numerical results show that sparse deep learning outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as conformal predictions, in prediction uncertainty quantification for time series data. Furthermore, our results indicate that the proposed method can consistently identify the autoregressive order for time series data and outperform existing methods in large-scale model compression. Our proposed method has important practical implications in fields such as finance, healthcare, and energy, where both accurate point estimates and prediction uncertainty quantification are of concern.

We present a versatile adaptation of existing dimensionality reduction (DR) objectives, enabling the simultaneous reduction of both sample and feature sizes. Correspondances between input and embedding samples are computed through a semi-relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport (OT) problem. When the embedding sample size matches that of the input, our model recovers classical popular DR models. When the embedding's dimensionality is unconstrained, we show that the OT plan delivers a competitive hard clustering. We emphasize the importance of intermediate stages that blend DR and clustering for summarizing real data and apply our method to visualize datasets of images.

An extension of Transformers is proposed that enables explicit relational reasoning through a novel module called the Abstractor. At the core of the Abstractor is a variant of attention called relational cross-attention. The approach is motivated by an architectural inductive bias for relational learning that disentangles relational information from extraneous features about individual objects. This enables explicit relational reasoning, supporting abstraction and generalization from limited data. The Abstractor is first evaluated on simple discriminative relational tasks and compared to existing relational architectures. Next, the Abstractor is evaluated on purely relational sequence-to-sequence tasks, where dramatic improvements are seen in sample efficiency compared to standard Transformers. Finally, Abstractors are evaluated on a collection of tasks based on mathematical problem solving, where modest but consistent improvements in performance and sample efficiency are observed.

The symmetry and geometry of input data are considered to be encoded in the internal data representation inside the neural network, but the specific encoding rule has been less investigated. By focusing on a joint group invariant function on the data-parameter domain, we present a systematic rule to find a dual group action on the parameter domain from a group action on the data domain. Further, we introduce generalized neural networks induced from the joint invariant functions, and present a new group theoretic proof of their universality theorems by using Schur's lemma. Since traditional universality theorems were demonstrated based on functional analytical methods, this study sheds light on the group theoretic aspect of the approximation theory, connecting geometric deep learning to abstract harmonic analysis.

Many modern algorithms for inverse problems and data assimilation rely on ensemble Kalman updates to blend prior predictions with observed data. Ensemble Kalman methods often perform well with a small ensemble size, which is essential in applications where generating each particle is costly. This paper develops a non-asymptotic analysis of ensemble Kalman updates that rigorously explains why a small ensemble size suffices if the prior covariance has moderate effective dimension due to fast spectrum decay or approximate sparsity. We present our theory in a unified framework, comparing several implementations of ensemble Kalman updates that use perturbed observations, square root filtering, and localization. As part of our analysis, we develop new dimension-free covariance estimation bounds for approximately sparse matrices that may be of independent interest.

Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human values, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude, and PaLM are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks on LLMs. Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense first randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs. SmoothLLM reduces the attack success rate on numerous popular LLMs to below one percentage point, avoids unnecessary conservatism, and admits provable guarantees on attack mitigation. Moreover, our defense uses exponentially fewer queries than existing attacks and is compatible with any LLM.

Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models which simulate stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to generate data from noise. Although diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, they have limitations in the unpaired image-to-image translation tasks due to the Gaussian prior assumption. Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB), which learns an SDE to translate between two arbitrary distributions, have risen as an attractive solution to this problem. However, none of SB models so far have been successful at unpaired translation between high-resolution images. In this work, we propose the Unpaired Neural Schr\"odinger Bridge (UNSB), which expresses SB problem as a sequence of adversarial learning problems. This allows us to incorporate advanced discriminators and regularization to learn a SB between unpaired data. We demonstrate that UNSB is scalable and successfully solves various unpaired image-to-image translation tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/cyclomon/UNSB}

It is a crucial challenge to reconstruct population dynamics using unlabeled samples from distributions at coarse time intervals. Recent approaches such as flow-based models or Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB) models have demonstrated appealing performance, yet the inferred sample trajectories either fail to account for the underlying stochasticity or are $\underline{D}$eep $\underline{M}$omentum Multi-Marginal $\underline{S}$chr\"odinger $\underline{B}$ridge(DMSB), a novel computational framework that learns the smooth measure-valued spline for stochastic systems that satisfy position marginal constraints across time. By tailoring the celebrated Bregman Iteration and extending the Iteration Proportional Fitting to phase space, we manage to handle high-dimensional multi-marginal trajectory inference tasks efficiently. Our algorithm outperforms baselines significantly, as evidenced by experiments for synthetic datasets and a real-world single-cell RNA sequence dataset. Additionally, the proposed approach can reasonably reconstruct the evolution of velocity distribution, from position snapshots only, when there is a ground truth velocity that is nevertheless inaccessible.

The mathematical forces at work behind Generative Adversarial Networks raise challenging theoretical issues. Motivated by the important question of characterizing the geometrical properties of the generated distributions, we provide a thorough analysis of Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) in both the finite sample and asymptotic regimes. We study the specific case where the latent space is univariate and derive results valid regardless of the dimension of the output space. We show in particular that for a fixed sample size, the optimal WGANs are closely linked with connected paths minimizing the sum of the squared Euclidean distances between the sample points. We also highlight the fact that WGANs are able to approach (for the 1-Wasserstein distance) the target distribution as the sample size tends to infinity, at a given convergence rate and provided the family of generative Lipschitz functions grows appropriately. We derive in passing new results on optimal transport theory in the semi-discrete setting.

Reliability of machine learning evaluation -- the consistency of observed evaluation scores across replicated model training runs -- is affected by several sources of nondeterminism which can be regarded as measurement noise. Current tendencies to remove noise in order to enforce reproducibility of research results neglect inherent nondeterminism at the implementation level and disregard crucial interaction effects between algorithmic noise factors and data properties. This limits the scope of conclusions that can be drawn from such experiments. Instead of removing noise, we propose to incorporate several sources of variance, including their interaction with data properties, into an analysis of significance and reliability of machine learning evaluation, with the aim to draw inferences beyond particular instances of trained models. We show how to use linear mixed effects models (LMEMs) to analyze performance evaluation scores, and to conduct statistical inference with a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). This allows us to incorporate arbitrary sources of noise like meta-parameter variations into statistical significance testing, and to assess performance differences conditional on data properties. Furthermore, a variance component analysis (VCA) enables the analysis of the contribution of noise sources to overall variance and the computation of a reliability coefficient by the ratio of substantial to total variance.

Sampling a probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational science and engineering. This task may be cast as an optimization problem over all probability measures, and an initial distribution can be evolved to the desired minimizer dynamically via gradient flows. Mean-field models, whose law is governed by the gradient flow in the space of probability measures, may also be identified; particle approximations of these mean-field models form the basis of algorithms. The gradient flow approach is also the basis of algorithms for variational inference, in which the optimization is performed over a parameterized family of probability distributions such as Gaussians, and the underlying gradient flow is restricted to the parameterized family. By choosing different energy functionals and metrics for the gradient flow, different algorithms with different convergence properties arise. In this paper, we concentrate on the Kullback-Leibler divergence after showing that, up to scaling, it has the unique property that the gradient flows resulting from this choice of energy do not depend on the normalization constant. For the metrics, we focus on variants of the Fisher-Rao, Wasserstein, and Stein metrics; we introduce the affine invariance property for gradient flows, and their corresponding mean-field models, determine whether a given metric leads to affine invariance, and modify it to make it affine invariant if it does not. We study the resulting gradient flows in both probability density space and Gaussian space. The flow in the Gaussian space may be understood as a Gaussian approximation of the flow. We demonstrate that the Gaussian approximation based on the metric and through moment closure coincide, establish connections between them, and study their long-time convergence properties showing the advantages of affine invariance.

Generative models inspired by dynamical transport of measure -- such as flows and diffusions -- construct a continuous-time map between two probability densities. Conventionally, one of these is the target density, only accessible through samples, while the other is taken as a simple base density that is data-agnostic. In this work, using the framework of stochastic interpolants, we formalize how to \textit{couple} the base and the target densities. This enables us to incorporate information about class labels or continuous embeddings to construct dynamical transport maps that serve as conditional generative models. We show that these transport maps can be learned by solving a simple square loss regression problem analogous to the standard independent setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of constructing dependent couplings in practice through experiments in super-resolution and in-painting.

We propose a graphical structure for structural equation models that is stable under marginalization under linearity and Gaussianity assumptions. We show that computing the maximum likelihood estimation of this model is equivalent to training a neural network. We implement a GPU-based algorithm that computes the maximum likelihood estimation of these models.  ( 2 min )

Neural networks have shown remarkable performance in computer vision, but their deployment in numerous scientific and technical fields is challenging due to their black-box nature. Scientists and practitioners need to evaluate the reliability of a decision, i.e., to know simultaneously if a model relies on the relevant features and whether these features are robust to image corruptions. Existing attribution methods aim to provide human-understandable explanations by highlighting important regions in the image domain, but fail to fully characterize a decision process's reliability. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Wavelet sCale Attribution Method (WCAM), a generalization of attribution from the pixel domain to the space-scale domain using wavelet transforms. Attribution in the wavelet domain reveals where {\it and} on what scales the model focuses, thus enabling us to assess whether a decision is reliable.  ( 3 min )

In this paper, we introduce a novel class of graphical models for representing time lag specific causal relationships and independencies of multivariate time series with unobserved confounders. We completely characterize these graphs and show that they constitute proper subsets of the currently employed model classes. As we show, from the novel graphs one can thus draw stronger causal inferences -- without additional assumptions. We further introduce a graphical representation of Markov equivalence classes of the novel graphs. This graphical representation contains more causal knowledge than what current state-of-the-art causal discovery algorithms learn.  ( 2 min )

Measures of power grid vulnerability are often assessed by the amount of damage an adversary can exact on the network. However, the cascading impact of such attacks is often overlooked, even though cascades are one of the primary causes of large-scale blackouts. This paper explores modifications of transmission line protection settings as candidates for adversarial attacks, which can remain undetectable as long as the network equilibrium state remains unaltered. This forms the basis of a black-box function in a Bayesian optimization procedure, where the objective is to find protection settings that maximize network degradation due to cascading. Notably, our proposed method is agnostic to the choice of the cascade simulator and its underlying assumptions. Numerical experiments reveal that, against conventional wisdom, maximally misconfiguring the protection settings of all network lines does not cause the most cascading. More surprisingly, even when the degree of misconfiguration is limited due to resource constraints, it is still possible to find settings that produce cascades comparable in severity to instances where there are no resource constraints.  ( 2 min )

Multi-fidelity (MF) methods are gaining popularity for enhancing surrogate modeling and design optimization by incorporating data from various low-fidelity (LF) models. While most existing MF methods assume a fixed dataset, adaptive sampling methods that dynamically allocate resources among fidelity models can achieve higher efficiency in the exploring and exploiting the design space. However, most existing MF methods rely on the hierarchical assumption of fidelity levels or fail to capture the intercorrelation between multiple fidelity levels and utilize it to quantify the value of the future samples and navigate the adaptive sampling. To address this hurdle, we propose a framework hinged on a latent embedding for different fidelity models and the associated pre-posterior analysis to explicitly utilize their correlation for adaptive sampling. In this framework, each infill sampling iteration includes two steps: We first identify the location of interest with the greatest potential improvement using the high-fidelity (HF) model, then we search for the next sample across all fidelity levels that maximize the improvement per unit cost at the location identified in the first step. This is made possible by a single Latent Variable Gaussian Process (LVGP) model that maps different fidelity models into an interpretable latent space to capture their correlations without assuming hierarchical fidelity levels. The LVGP enables us to assess how LF sampling candidates will affect HF response with pre-posterior analysis and determine the next sample with the best benefit-to-cost ratio. Through test cases, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the benchmark methods in both MF global fitting (GF) and Bayesian Optimization (BO) problems in convergence rate and robustness. Moreover, the method offers the flexibility to switch between GF and BO by simply changing the acquisition function.  ( 3 min )

Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), synthetic likelihood, and neural posterior estimation (NPE) rely on simulating statistics to infer parameters of intractable likelihood models. However, such methods are known to yield untrustworthy and misleading inference outcomes under model misspecification, thus hindering their widespread applicability. In this work, we propose the first general approach to handle model misspecification that works across different classes of SBI methods. Leveraging the fact that the choice of statistics determines the degree of misspecification in SBI, we introduce a regularized loss function that penalises those statistics that increase the mismatch between the data and the model. Taking NPE and ABC as use cases, we demonstrate the superior performance of our method on high-dimensional time-series models that are artificially misspecified. We also apply our method to real data from the field of radio propagation where the model is known to be misspecified. We show empirically that the method yields robust inference in misspecified scenarios, whilst still being accurate when the model is well-specified.  ( 2 min )

Existing approaches to algorithmic fairness aim to ensure equitable outcomes if human decision-makers comply perfectly with algorithmic decisions. However, perfect compliance with the algorithm is rarely a reality or even a desirable outcome in human-AI collaboration. Yet, recent studies have shown that selective compliance with fair algorithms can amplify discrimination relative to the prior human policy. As a consequence, ensuring equitable outcomes requires fundamentally different algorithmic design principles that ensure robustness to the decision-maker's (a priori unknown) compliance pattern. We define the notion of compliance-robustly fair algorithmic recommendations that are guaranteed to (weakly) improve fairness in decisions, regardless of the human's compliance pattern. We propose a simple optimization strategy to identify the best performance-improving compliance-robustly fair policy. However, we show that it may be infeasible to design algorithmic recommendations that are simultaneously fair in isolation, compliance-robustly fair, and more accurate than the human policy; thus, if our goal is to improve the equity and accuracy of human-AI collaboration, it may not be desirable to enforce traditional fairness constraints.  ( 2 min )

We identify hidden layers inside a DNN with group actions on the data space, and formulate the DNN as a dual voice transform with respect to Koopman operator, a linear representation of the group action. Based on the group theoretic arguments, particularly by using Schur's lemma, we show a simple proof of the universality of those DNNs.  ( 2 min )

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in the field of generative modeling due to its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space. However, the common practice of learning latent space EBMs with non-convergent short-run MCMC for prior and posterior sampling is hindering the model from further progress; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice often leads to degraded generation quality and instability in training, especially with highly multi-modal and/or high-dimensional target distributions. To remedy this sampling issue, in this paper we introduce a simple but effective diffusion-based amortization method for long-run MCMC sampling and develop a novel learning algorithm for the latent space EBM based on it. We provide theoretical evidence that the learned amortization of MCMC is a valid long-run MCMC sampler. Experiments on several image modeling benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared with strong counterparts  ( 2 min )

In previous literature, backward error analysis was used to find ordinary differential equations (ODEs) approximating the gradient descent trajectory. It was found that finite step sizes implicitly regularize solutions because terms appearing in the ODEs penalize the two-norm of the loss gradients. We prove that the existence of similar implicit regularization in RMSProp and Adam depends on their hyperparameters and the training stage, but with a different "norm" involved: the corresponding ODE terms either penalize the (perturbed) one-norm of the loss gradients or, on the contrary, hinder its decrease (the latter case being typical). We also conduct numerical experiments and discuss how the proven facts can influence generalization.  ( 2 min )

We study the problem of training a flow-based generative model, parametrized by a two-layer autoencoder, to sample from a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture. We provide a sharp end-to-end analysis of the problem. First, we provide a tight closed-form characterization of the learnt velocity field, when parametrized by a shallow denoising auto-encoder trained on a finite number $n$ of samples from the target distribution. Building on this analysis, we provide a sharp description of the corresponding generative flow, which pushes the base Gaussian density forward to an approximation of the target density. In particular, we provide closed-form formulae for the distance between the mean of the generated mixture and the mean of the target mixture, which we show decays as $\Theta_n(\frac{1}{n})$. Finally, this rate is shown to be in fact Bayes-optimal.  ( 2 min )

When artificial neural networks have demonstrated exceptional practical success in a variety of domains, investigations into their theoretical characteristics, such as their approximation power, statistical properties, and generalization performance, have concurrently made significant strides. In this paper, we construct a novel theory for understanding the effectiveness of neural networks, which offers a perspective distinct from prior research. Specifically, we explore the rationale underlying a common practice during the construction of neural network models: sample splitting. Our findings indicate that the optimal hyperparameters derived from sample splitting can enable a neural network model that asymptotically minimizes the prediction risk. We conduct extensive experiments across different application scenarios and network architectures, and the results manifest our theory's effectiveness.  ( 2 min )

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems, but also in the training of large language models. In contrast to infinite horizon MDPs optimal policies are not stationary, policies must be learned for every single epoch. In practice all parameters are often trained simultaneously, ignoring the inherent structure suggested by dynamic programming. This paper introduces a combination of dynamic programming and policy gradient called dynamic policy gradient, where the parameters are trained backwards in time. For the tabular softmax parametrisation we carry out the convergence analysis for simultaneous and dynamic policy gradient towards global optima, both in the exact and sampled gradient settings without regularisation. It turns out that the use of dynamic policy gradient training much better exploits the structure of finite-time problems which is reflected in improved convergence bounds.  ( 2 min )

Posterior sampling has been shown to be a powerful Bayesian approach for solving imaging inverse problems. The recent plug-and-play unadjusted Langevin algorithm (PnP-ULA) has emerged as a promising method for Monte Carlo sampling and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation by combining physical measurement models with deep-learning priors specified using image denoisers. However, the intricate relationship between the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA and the mismatched data-fidelity and denoiser has not been theoretically analyzed. We address this gap by proposing a posterior-L2 pseudometric and using it to quantify an explicit error bound for PnP-ULA under mismatched posterior distribution. We numerically validate our theory on several inverse problems such as sampling from Gaussian mixture models and image deblurring. Our results suggest that the sensitivity of the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA to a mismatch in the measurement model and the denoiser can be precisely characterized.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes a latent prompt Transformer model for solving challenging optimization problems such as molecule design, where the goal is to find molecules with optimal values of a target chemical or biological property that can be computed by an existing software. Our proposed model consists of three components. (1) A latent vector whose prior distribution is modeled by a Unet transformation of a Gaussian white noise vector. (2) A molecule generation model that generates the string-based representation of molecule conditional on the latent vector in (1). We adopt the causal Transformer model that takes the latent vector in (1) as prompt. (3) A property prediction model that predicts the value of the target property of a molecule based on a non-linear regression on the latent vector in (1). We call the proposed model the latent prompt Transformer model. After initial training of the model on existing molecules and their property values, we then gradually shift the model distribution towards the region that supports desired values of the target property for the purpose of molecule design. Our experiments show that our proposed model achieves state of the art performances on several benchmark molecule design tasks.  ( 2 min )

This paper investigates new families of compositional optimization problems, called $\underline{\bf n}$on-$\underline{\bf s}$mooth $\underline{\bf w}$eakly-$\underline{\bf c}$onvex $\underline{\bf f}$inite-sum $\underline{\bf c}$oupled $\underline{\bf c}$ompositional $\underline{\bf o}$ptimization (NSWC FCCO). There has been a growing interest in FCCO due to its wide-ranging applications in machine learning and AI, as well as its ability to address the shortcomings of stochastic algorithms based on empirical risk minimization. However, current research on FCCO presumes that both the inner and outer functions are smooth, limiting their potential to tackle a more diverse set of problems. Our research expands on this area by examining non-smooth weakly-convex FCCO, where the outer function is weakly convex and non-decreasing, and the inner function is weakly-convex. We analyze a single-loop algorithm and establish its complexity for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the Moreau envelop of the objective function. Additionally, we also extend the algorithm to solving novel non-smooth weakly-convex tri-level finite-sum coupled compositional optimization problems, which feature a nested arrangement of three functions. Lastly, we explore the applications of our algorithms in deep learning for two-way partial AUC maximization and multi-instance two-way partial AUC maximization, using empirical studies to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.  ( 2 min )

We propose conditional flows of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) with the negative distance kernel for posterior sampling and conditional generative modeling. This MMD, which is also known as energy distance, has several advantageous properties like efficient computation via slicing and sorting. We approximate the joint distribution of the ground truth and the observations using discrete Wasserstein gradient flows and establish an error bound for the posterior distributions. Further, we prove that our particle flow is indeed a Wasserstein gradient flow of an appropriate functional. The power of our method is demonstrated by numerical examples including conditional image generation and inverse problems like superresolution, inpainting and computed tomography in low-dose and limited-angle settings.  ( 2 min )

Sampling a target probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental challenge in computational science and engineering. Recent work shows that algorithms derived by considering gradient flows in the space of probability measures open up new avenues for algorithm development. This paper makes three contributions to this sampling approach by scrutinizing the design components of such gradient flows. Any instantiation of a gradient flow for sampling needs an energy functional and a metric to determine the flow, as well as numerical approximations of the flow to derive algorithms. Our first contribution is to show that the Kullback-Leibler divergence, as an energy functional, has the unique property (among all f-divergences) that gradient flows resulting from it do not depend on the normalization constant of the target distribution. Our second contribution is to study the choice of metric from the perspective of invariance. The Fisher-Rao metric is known as the unique choice (up to scaling) that is diffeomorphism invariant. As a computationally tractable alternative, we introduce a relaxed, affine invariance property for the metrics and gradient flows. In particular, we construct various affine invariant Wasserstein and Stein gradient flows. Affine invariant gradient flows are shown to behave more favorably than their non-affine-invariant counterparts when sampling highly anisotropic distributions, in theory and by using particle methods. Our third contribution is to study, and develop efficient algorithms based on Gaussian approximations of the gradient flows; this leads to an alternative to particle methods. We establish connections between various Gaussian approximate gradient flows, discuss their relation to gradient methods arising from parametric variational inference, and study their convergence properties both theoretically and numerically.  ( 3 min )

The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning models; however, its adoption in econometrics and finance is limited. This paper discusses the extent to which Variational Inference constitutes a reliable and feasible alternative to Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian inference in GARCH-like models. Through a large-scale experiment involving the constituents of the S&P 500 index, several Variational Inference optimizers, a variety of volatility models, and a case study, we show that Variational Inference is an attractive, remarkably well-calibrated, and competitive method for Bayesian learning.  ( 2 min )

Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) refers to the phenomenon where increasing network depth leads to homogeneous node representations. While previous work has established that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) exponentially lose expressive power, it remains controversial whether the graph attention mechanism can mitigate oversmoothing. In this work, we provide a definitive answer to this question through a rigorous mathematical analysis, by viewing attention-based GNNs as nonlinear time-varying dynamical systems and incorporating tools and techniques from the theory of products of inhomogeneous matrices and the joint spectral radius. We establish that, contrary to popular belief, the graph attention mechanism cannot prevent oversmoothing and loses expressive power exponentially. The proposed framework extends the existing results on oversmoothing for symmetric GCNs to a significantly broader class of GNN models, including random walk GCNs, Graph Attention Networks (GATs) and (graph) transformers. In particular, our analysis accounts for asymmetric, state-dependent and time-varying aggregation operators and a wide range of common nonlinear activation functions, such as ReLU, LeakyReLU, GELU and SiLU.  ( 2 min )

I here a lot of people say that models like flamingo and Idefics aren't really multimodal, that they just use clip models to give text captions to the transformer, that there not "base multimodal" what exactly does it mean? Is there a way to directly tokenize images to transformers? Are there major architectural changes, if so, how would they differ from GPT-2? submitted by /u/vatsadev [link] [comments]

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17288v1 Github: https://github.com/LinkSoul-AI/AutoAgents Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have enabled remarkable advances in automated task-solving with multi-agent systems. However, most existing LLM-based multi-agent approaches rely on predefined agents to handle simple tasks, limiting the adaptability of multi-agent collaboration to different scenarios. Therefore, we introduce AutoAgents, an innovative framework that adaptively generates and coordinates multiple specialized agents to build an AI team according to different tasks. Specifically, AutoAgents couples the relationship between tasks and roles by dynamically generating multiple required agents based on task content and planning solutions for the current task based on the generated expert agents. Multiple specialized agents collaborate with each other to efficiently accomplish tasks. Concurrently, an observer role is incorporated into the framework to reflect on the designated plans and agents' responses and improve upon them. Our experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that AutoAgents generates more coherent and accurate solutions than the existing multi-agent methods. This underscores the significance of assigning different roles to different tasks and of team cooperation, offering new perspectives for tackling complex tasks. https://preview.redd.it/2jmnr73kymsb1.jpg?width=1663&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08f53d5da3d12e685c5d4b24f27628d880a917c1 https://preview.redd.it/jklyr73kymsb1.jpg?width=824&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6f69b2fc5ef4bda60553da0bb953bd3c07ad506b https://preview.redd.it/elatla3kymsb1.jpg?width=1029&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e7e508cedd17b4798c9f90bf1c089beff3042f4a ​ submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi there! I was interested in learning more about LoRA but I was having a hard time finding a good simple example of implementing LoRA, as most sources are training large models and use a combination of huggingface transformers and the loralib package the original LoRA authors wrote. As a result, I ended up writing a simple LoRA implementation from scratch in pytorch lightning, and I figured other people might find it helpful as a learning resource or springboard: https://github.com/sunildkumar/lora_from_scratch/tree/main submitted by /u/dragseon [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In this project, we benchmarked Bark text-to-speech across 26 different consumer GPUs. The goal: To get Bark to read 144K food recipes from Food.com's recipe dataset. You can read the full tutorial here: https://blog.salad.com/bark-benchmark-text-to-speech/ Included: Architecture diagram, data preparation, inference server setup, queue worker, setting up container group & compiling the results Code-blocks included in the tutorial. Words per dollar for each GPU: https://preview.redd.it/6daqluu3omsb1.png?width=2000&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc4b74fe6ee80c2721ab324eb0d9a2d7c2f7ddb1 Although the latest cards are indeed much faster than older cards at performing the inference, there’s really a sweet spot for cost-performance in the lower end 30xx series cards. Conclusions As is often the case, there’s a clear trade-off here between cost and performance. Higher end cards are faster, but their disproportionate cost makes them more expensive per word spoken. The model’s median speed is surprisingly similar across GPU types, even though the peak performance can be quite different. Salad has a lot of RTX 3060 GPUs available, based on their relatively low speed, yet huge number of inferences performed over the test. No matter what GPU you select, you should be prepared for significant variability in performance. Qualitative: While bark’s speech is often impressively natural sounding, it does have a tendency to go off script sometimes. We’ve also made available audio from 1000 top-rated recipes, paired with the script it was trying to read. submitted by /u/SaladChefs [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Researchers from Brown University presented a new study supporting that translating unsafe prompts into `low-resource languages` allows them to easily bypass safety measures in LLMs. By converting English inputs like "how to steal without getting caught" into Zulu and feeding to GPT-4, harmful responses slipped through 80% of the time. English prompts were blocked over 99% of the time, for comparison. The study benchmarked attacks across 12 diverse languages and categories: High-resource: English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi Mid-resource: Ukrainian, Bengali, Thai, Hebrew Low-resource: Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, Guarani The low-resource languages showed serious vulnerability to generating harmful responses, with combined attack success rates of around 79%. Mid-resource language success rates were much lower at 22%, while high-resource languages showed minimal vulnerability at around 11% success. Attacks worked as well as state-of-the-art techniques without needing adversarial prompts. These languages are used by 1.2 billion speakers today and allows easy exploitation by translating prompts. The English-centric focus misses vulnerabilities in other languages. TLDR: Bypassing safety in AI chatbots is easy by translating prompts to low-resource languages (like Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, and Guarani). Shows gaps in multilingual safety training. Full summary Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

What are the prerequisites to read the book: "probabilistic machine learning an introduction" by Kevin P. Murphy? submitted by /u/OneAdhesiveness2585 [link] [comments]

Webpage : Moving Object Based Collision-Free Video Synopsis (IEEE SMC 2018) (anton-jeran.github.io) Paper : Moving Object Based Collision-Free Video Synopsis | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore Presentation : [IEEE SMC 2018] Moving Object Based Collision-Free Video Synopsis - YouTube submitted by /u/Snoo63916 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Faster MusicGen Generation with Streaming There's no need to wait for MusicGen to generate the full audio before you can start listening to the outputs ⏰ With streaming, you can play the audio as soon as the first chunk is ready 🎵 In practice, this reduces the latency to just 5s ⚡️ Check-out the demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/sanchit-gandhi/musicgen-streaming How Does it Work? MusicGen is an auto-regressive transformer-based model, meaning generates audio codes (tokens) in a causal fashion. At each decoding step, the model generates a new set of audio codes, conditional on the text input and all previous audio codes. From the frame rate of the EnCodec model used to decode the generated codes to audio waveform, each set of generated audio codes corresponds to 0.02 seconds. This me…

i have to generate a confusion matrix for object detection through my own code. if i have predicted Bounding Box A (BB-A) which matches to Ground Truth A (GT-A), and I have another predicted Bounding Box B (BB-B) with a lower score than BB-A, does BB-B count as a true positive/match? or is it considered a false positive given that there has already been a matched BB to GT-A? i.e., with matching bounding boxes for generating a confusion matrix, is it a one-to-one matching? or is it more like match one GT to as many predictions? submitted by /u/Alarmed-Broccoli2536 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Wise-Astronaut-4047 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Are there classical feature extraction methods that work on sets i.e. data of variable size? I'd like to start with a feature matrix X_in of shape N x f and have some feature mixing to arive at X_out N x h (N=size of set, f=input feature size, h=output feature size). Here, N can vary. For clarity, one set(containing N vectors of size f) is one sample. A dataset consists of many samples(each one being a set of varying size). Then I'd run this through a classical ML model. So, essentially, I'm looking for something like DeepSets or Transformers - can handle data of varying size and is permutation equivariant, but I don't wanna train for long. ​ https://fabianfuchsml.github.io/learningonsets/ submitted by /u/Mundane_Pay1506 [link] [comments]

Hi, I'm a 21yr old physics undergrad, and I have zero knowledge in neural networks / machine learning / so on. I have an opportunity to do a research project on neural ODEs, so I want to know more about the field: Is it an emerging field or is it mature and well-researched? What are my career outlooks if I take this project? Thank you. submitted by /u/moorelibqc17412 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Rosenbrock function is non-convex, but has exactly one local minimum. Is there a specific name for such functions? Are there any theorems about them? Any special optimization algorithms? On the first glance, while being non-convex, they seem to be "easier" to optimize than functions that have multiple local minima, such as Rastrigin function. submitted by /u/Tomarchelone [link] [comments]

Hi folks, we played around sticking production pipelines and vector dbs together to enable "talking to your data". We created an example with Zendesk, but it would work with any custom python generator or existing connectors. Project: Talk to your Zendesk tickets with Weaviate’s Verba and dlt: A step by step guide If you are interested to try more ready made connectors, to for example talk with your github or asana data or something else. Who are we? dlt, the open source loading library: https://pypi.org/project/dlt/ Like the demo? Give us a git star Want to discuss? join the dlt slack community submitted by /u/Thinker_Assignment [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

When can we expect to get the decisions? Any idea folks? What can be a good cutoff for main or findings? submitted by /u/Ok_Swan3875 [link] [comments]

Hi. I am a college student and I am trying to run deep learning models (hopefully LLMs one day) and my laptop keep crashing because of ram issue. So I am going to build a new desktop. I am thinking of buying 2 rtx 4090 and Parallelizing them instead of buying A100 because buying 2 rtx 4090 is half the cost of buying A100. But is there a downside of Parallelizing vs buying a single gpu with large vram? If I am willing to take longer to train a model, can i use 3 rtx 4090 instead of a100 80gb model?? submitted by /u/ColumbiaGSAlum [link] [comments]

I read https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13504 which compare different transformer models. But now is 2023, I am not sure if any better models appear in this time series. ​ https://preview.redd.it/o6sihjqjrhsb1.png?width=1076&format=png&auto=webp&s=3db7d50590270bac52e7115e1e9903a6785957d2 submitted by /u/Trust_Ok [link] [comments]

Nicholas Crispino, Kyle Montgomery, Fankun Zeng, Dawn Song, Chenguang Wang Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03710 Abstract: We introduce a method to improve the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models on general language understanding tasks. Specifically, we build an autonomous agent to instruct the reasoning process of large language models. We show this approach further unleashes the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models to more tasks. We study the performance of our method on a wide set of datasets spanning generation, classification, and reasoning. We show that our method generalizes to most tasks and obtains state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 20 of the 29 datasets that we evaluate. For instance, our method boosts the performance of state-of-the-art large language models by a large margin, including Vicuna-13b (13.3%), Llama-2-70b-chat (23.2%), and GPT-3.5 Turbo (17.0%). Compared to zero-shot chain of thought, our improvement in reasoning is striking, with an average increase of 10.5%. With our method, Llama-2-70b-chat outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 Turbo by 10.2%. The code will be available at https://github.com/wang-research-lab/agentinstruct. submitted by /u/ncrispino [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey all, I am generating a set of extra MNIST digits for a research project, and I am interested in somehow computing the distance between the distribution these digits represent and the distribution that the MNIST train set, for example, represents. The issue is that it seems like typical methods (Jensen-Shannon, Wasserstein, etc.) collapse at high dimensions. Is there a consensus solid approach to do this nowadays? Thanks! submitted by /u/SignificantSundae793 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The next big thing in AI products for consumers is likely to be products that are more personalized, intelligent, and integrated into our daily lives. For example, we can expect to see more AI-powered personal assistants that can help us with a wider range of tasks, such as managing our schedules, making travel arrangements, and even providing companionship. We may also see more AI-powered devices in our homes, such as refrigerators that can track our food inventory and suggest recipes, or thermostats that can learn our heating and cooling preferences and adjust themselves accordingly. AI is also poised to revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us. For example, AI-powered translation apps could allow us to communicate with people from all over the world in real time. AI-…

The increasing dominance of Big Tech in AI may lead to a literal thirst for water for everyone else, as data centers are projected to consume 450 million gallons of water daily by 2030. This poses a significant concern for drought-stricken regions, such as Spain's Talavera de la Reina, where a planned data facility could consume 176 million gallons annually. Data center operators require large amounts of energy, and the lack of transparency in measuring water usage exacerbates the issue. Only 39% of data centers measured their water usage last year, highlighting the need for greater transparency. The demand for computing power is outpacing sustainability efforts, creating a challenge for the industry. Even simple interactions with AI, like a 20-question conversation with ChatGPT, contribute to water consumption. Source : https://thehustle.co/big-tech-s-thirst-for-ai-dominance-may-bring-literal-thirst-for-everyone-else/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Hey guys. Been working as an annotator for a fairly well-known AI company and loving it/loving learning about the industry. It primarily uses writing skills but I’m wondering where it could take me in the AI world? Any tips, next steps or suggestions? Any key skills/hard skills you’d recommend? submitted by /u/op3rafish [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Tao_Dragon [link] [comments]

Despite a letter signed by 500 technologists and business leaders calling for a pause on AI advancements, AI development has continued to accelerate. Companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon have been actively working on newer models and greater capabilities. Advancements in AI include the integration of ChatGPT-style chatbots and AI image generators into various startups and businesses. The so-called pause on AI was more like a firing gun, with companies pouring resources into the AI tech race. Not only have there been technical advancements, but civil society, content creators, and lawmakers have also responded to the evolving AI landscape. Source : https://gizmodo.com/everything-thats-happened-in-ai-since-open-letter-1850891057 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Researchers from Brown University presented a new study supporting that translating unsafe prompts into `low-resource languages` allows them to easily bypass safety measures in LLMs. By converting English inputs like "how to steal without getting caught" into Zulu and feeding to GPT-4, harmful responses slipped through 80% of the time. English prompts were blocked over 99% of the time, for comparison. The study benchmarked attacks across 12 diverse languages and categories: High-resource: English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi Mid-resource: Ukrainian, Bengali, Thai, Hebrew Low-resource: Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, Guarani The low-resource languages showed serious vulnerability to generating harmful responses, with combined attack success rates of around 79%. Mid-resource language success rates were much lower at 22%, while high-resource languages showed minimal vulnerability at around 11% success. Attacks worked as well as state-of-the-art techniques without needing adversarial prompts. These languages are used by 1.2 billion speakers today and allows easy exploitation by translating prompts. The English-centric focus misses vulnerabilities in other languages. TLDR: Bypassing safety in AI chatbots is easy by translating prompts to low-resource languages (like Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, and Guarani). Shows gaps in multilingual safety training. Full summary Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

News provided by aibrews.com ​ Google DeepMind introduced 𝗥𝗧-𝗫: a generalist AI model to help advance how robots can learn new skills. To train it, DeepMind together with 33 academic labs developed Open X-Embodiment, a massive open dataset that compiles over 500 skills and 150,000 tasks from 22 robot types. It is the most comprehensive robotics dataset of its kind released to accelerate the development of multi-robot models that could be trained to generalize across platforms, scenes, objects and tasks. [Details]. Researchers from Meta AI present Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (AnyMAL), a unified model that understands multiple inputs (vision, audio, motion sensor signals). When multiple modalities are interleaved and given as input the model reasons over them jointly [Paper…

Artificial Intelligence can revolutionize weight loss through personalized health optimization. Imagine an AI system that integrates real-time biometric data from wearables with deep learning algorithms. This system would analyze everything: your heart rate, sleep patterns, stress levels, and even blood markers. Based on this data, it would construct a dynamically evolving, tailor-made regimen for diet, exercise, and sleep. But it doesn't stop there. By harnessing natural language processing, this AI could act as a 24/7 personal coach. It could provide real-time feedback during workouts, recommend meals when you're dining out, and even gently nudge you when it detects emotional eating triggers. If you’re in the grocery store, it could guide your choices, pushing you towards nutritious options that align with your current health metrics. The effectiveness here isn't just the personalization, but the adaptability. The AI adjusts its recommendations as it learns more about you, essentially evolving in real-time to your body's responses. It’s all about creating a seamless, intuitive experience that removes the burden of planning, decision-making, and self-monitoring from the individual, making weight loss more achievable than ever. By focusing on this comprehensive, data-driven approach, AI can eliminate much of the guesswork and emotional burden from weight loss, leading to more sustainable and effective outcomes. CGPT-4 submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/hungryillini [link] [comments]

Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans Experts divided on whether a new wave of call centre automation will make for better jobs for people, or merely throw millions out of work submitted by /u/AminoOxi [link] [comments]

Hi, I resell clothing items that has stock images with cropped faces of the model. I need a tool that can help me generate proper model images. I’ve used several tools and it’s doesn’t look realistic then i finally came across a powerful ai tool but it costs 30,000 usd annually so.. Above is an example of what i mean submitted by /u/basheerbgw [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Vinitneo [link] [comments]

Stack Overflow was created in 2008 to provide programmers with high-quality technical information. Within three years, it became indispensable to working programmers, with millions of unique visitors each month. Google's OneBox feature, which provides instant answers above search results, led to a decline in traffic for sites like Stack Overflow. Large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard aim to ingest the web comprehensively. These models rely on sources like Wikipedia and Reddit for training data. Stack Overflow's new posts have decreased by sixteen percent since the launch of ChatGPT. Source : https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/how-will-ai-learn-next submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Share your insights. submitted by /u/Cygnet-Digital [link] [comments]

I've noticed more than 1,000 new AI tools hitting the market in the last 30 days! As a student, I'm especially interested in finding AI tools that can help with studying. These aren't just essay generators or note-taking apps. While we all know about ChatGPT and Grammarly, some lesser-known tools are also making a big difference. So, I've compiled a list of the top 10 AI tools focused on educational use—tools that I personally use to improve my efficiency and output. AI tool Category Use for ChatGPT AI Writing This platform allows students to ask queries, request help, or simply chat with the AI in a dynamic and interactive manner. It’s great for brainstorming essay topics and seeking suggestions on how to improve your writing style. But I don’t recommend it as an autonomous AI…

Hello everyone! I'm conducting research for a car brand client who is interested in an interactive AI avatar. The idea is to have a screen in a mall where individuals can engage with this avatar and inquire about the latest car model. We plan to train the AI with the car's FAQs to ensure it can address customer queries effectively. The main challenge is ensuring the AI's responses are tailored to the customer's interaction. Here's a perfect example of what we're aiming for (starting at 1:27): https://youtu.be/PqoH9NotmyE?si=zH9kGIaou1x6RoIg&t=86 Does anyone know how this can be acheived? submitted by /u/MrGoodBang [link] [comments]

Traditional benchmarks like the Turing Test are being challenged as outdated. Mustafa Suleyman, a prominent figure in the AI community and co-founder of DeepMind, has proposed a novel approach to gauge the intelligence of AI: its ability to generate wealth.[1] SoftBank CEO Son says artificial general intelligence will come within 10 years.[2] Hugging Face Collaborates with Microsoft to launch Hugging Face Model Catalog on Azure.[3] Artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT to be allowed in Australian schools from 2024.[4] Sources: [1] https://winbuzzer.com/2023/10/02/deepminds-mustafa-suleyman-suggests-new-turing-test-based-on-ai-making-money-xcxwbn/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/softbank-ceo-masayoshi-son-says-artificial-general-intelligence-will-come-within-2023-10-04/ [3] https://huggingface.co/blog/hugging-face-endpoints-on-azure [4] https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/06/chatgpt-ai-allowed-australian-schools-2024 submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]

Hi! I’m very ignorant of AI so please bear with me. I was wondering if there is any way to use AI to fix a low quality audio rip? Specifically there’s a movie I adore that never had a soundtrack release. Somebody ripped the music from the DVD and removed the audio and sound effects, but the quality is not the best. Is there any way AI could be used to improve this? submitted by /u/Adventurous_Ice5035 [link] [comments]

I am a computer science graduate student. As part of my coursework, I am exploring the ethical issues of using Large Language Models for mental healthcare applications. I found four unique examples from the real world and outlined the ethical dilemma within them. I intend to analyze these dilemmas using various ethical frameworks in order to come up with solutions. While I am interested in getting a publication out of this work, I am unsure of the types of conferences/journals that accept case-study articles (specifically in AI ethics). Any advice from academicians over here would be greatly appreciated! submitted by /u/jwalapoet [link] [comments]

hey! this is probably asked alot, but what is the go-to AI speech generation tool that can be used for free? im making a mission in a mil-sim game called arma 3, and i need some voicelines for radio communications to the player and i dont have enough people who are willing to do voicelines for it so ive taken to AI to hopefully fill this hole. If there are little, or even no good free services, I wouldn't mind if I had to spend a small amount of money for it. thanks in advance o7 submitted by /u/BritishSpuds [link] [comments]

I got banned today for sharing a music video that was apparently AI-generated. As video and images become more realistic, is there an expectation that this content can actually be filtered? submitted by /u/Unwitting_Observer [link] [comments]

Greetings! I would like to begin by stating that I understand why one has much hope in such technologies. The world as we know it is in a drastic shift, and it's hard to think of what it's going to become, and so many cling to hopeful ideas that give promises. AGI/Singularity doesn't have a grounding basis in evidence, or research. It's all theoretics, and the foundation for each technology is quite weak. You see, the mind is a sensorial parsing relational network. All of our sensorial experience is incorporated into a world-model, and thus it begins to rationalize, and be lucid of the environment. I don't think it's possible to re-create this kind of experience with a linear instruction set, let alone neuromorphic computing, or wetware. Each has to be built from the bottom-up with immense precision, and thus far we don't understand the mind. Realistically speaking everything is consciousness, and integrating that idea is the only way forward. tl;dr Replicating cognition is a completely theoretical endeavor, and requires vast amounts of understanding in regards to the nature of reality, not just the quantum, but the unique stochastic behavior of each higher-ordered system. submitted by /u/lucy_chxn [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/liberty4now [link] [comments]

Earlier this week I wrote about several ways to generalize trig functions. Since trig functions have addition theorems like a natural question is whether generalized trig functions also have addition theorems. Hyperbolic functions have well-known addition theorems analogous to the addition theorems above. This isn’t too surprising since circular and hyperbolic functions are fundamentally two […] Addition theorems first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

In the previous post I said I was trying remember where I’d seen the tangent sum applied. I mentioned a couple near misses, and it turns out that what I was trying to remember was another near miss. What I’d seen before was not the tangent sum but the hyperbolic tangent sum. Several people suggested […] Hyperbolic tangent sum first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

In this post, we elucidate the simple yet powerful idea of combining user profiles and item attributes to generate personalized content recommendations using LLMs. As demonstrated throughout the post, these models hold immense potential in generating high-quality, context-aware input text, which leads to enhanced recommendations. To illustrate this, we guide you through the process of integrating a feature store (representing user profiles) with an LLM to generate these personalized recommendations.  ( 13 min )

In this post, we provide an overview of popular multimodality models. We also demonstrate how to deploy these pre-trained models on Amazon SageMaker. Furthermore, we discuss the diverse applications of these models, focusing particularly on several real-world scenarios, such as zero-shot tag and attribution generation for ecommerce and automatic prompt generation from images.  ( 13 min )

A research team is aiming to shake up the status quo for earthquake models. Researchers from the Universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Munich recently released a paper describing a new model that delivers deep learning to earthquake forecasting. Dubbed RECAST, the model can use larger datasets and Read article >  ( 6 min )

A persistent challenge in deep learning is optimizing neural network models for diverse hardware configurations, balancing performance and low latency. Learn how SpaceEvo automates hardware-aware neural architecture search to fine-tune DNN models for swift execution on diverse devices. The post Efficient and hardware-friendly neural architecture search with SpaceEvo appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 10 min )

Hello. I've developed a simple Neural Recommender System (NRR) with the following architecture: Input layer: 38 neurons Hidden layer: 19 neurons with ReLU activation function Output layer: 1 neuron with a sigmoid activation function The input dataset consists of 39 columns: 38 features and 1 label (with values of 0 or 1). The model is designed to output the probability that a specific input should be classified with label 1. Currently, I am experimenting with hyperparameter tuning, adjusting the learning rate, epoch, and batch size. However, I've observed an issue where, with certain combinations of hyperparameters, the maximum probability outputted by the model is not 1, but rather 0.25, for example. How is this possible? Thanks submitted by /u/nllnp [link] [comments]

I'm looking for resources, papers, or experiences that compare the performance of large language models (LLMs). I'm trying to find a honest benchmark to compare the capabilities of the latest large models, while really intrested un those: GPT-3.5 Instruct, GPT-4, Claude 2, Claude Instant 100k, Palm2-Bizon, jurassic-2, LLama2 70 and other state-of-the-art LLama2 fine tunes (possibly an Orca-style model). I'm interested in general benchmarks and, if they exist, comparisons of performance on synthetic data generation tasks (both generating data with the "textbook are all you need" approach used in Phi and some Orca/EvolveInstuct-style models like Wizard...). submitted by /u/Distinct-Target7503 [link] [comments]

I have a long list of responses from a poll (in this case, we've asked our Facebook community we should have at our music festival). Our goal is to count the total mentions for each artist, but the data quality is low. Here is some sample data: Rena Guinn and the Gentlemen Blackwater Railroad Company Mo' Mojo Music !! We would love to be apart of this awesome event! Amazing!!!!! The Rollin' Rust came threw at the #falldownfest last weekend 🙂 much love:) keep it up boys 🙂 Luke Hess Langhorne Slim!!!!!, Sierra Hull, First Aid Kit, Jim Lauderdale (always) We feel the data quality is too poor for basic LDA approaches (lots of misspellings, odd phrasings) and we feel a LLM would be best at least extracting the names of artists using context. We have found that ChatGPT and Claude are decent at the extraction tasks on small samples but can't handle the full input, and are next to worthless on the counting task. We've tried very specific and differnet prompts, but haven't been able to get a good result. So how should I approach this problem? I'm not sure how to break this down in to prompts or substeps. I'm not sure how to do anything of this outside of a browser, and I'm a data science novice, but willing to learn some things. Here's an example of a prompt that's not returning correct counts (off by >50% in most cases) The following is raw text comments copied from a poll. Count the total number of mentions in the poll and create a table that contains columns Band (a unique list of bands) and a column containing the total number of mentions. The table should cover the top 100 bands by total mentions. Use judgement and context to conform band names in to unique values (Example: The Town Pants, Town Pants, townpants are all the same band). Count completely and accurately. Now here is the raw data: submitted by /u/strway2heaven77 [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

I am a computer science graduate student. As part of my coursework, I am exploring the ethical issues of using Large Language Models for mental healthcare applications. I found four unique examples from the real world and outlined the ethical dilemma within them. I intend to analyze these dilemmas using various ethical frameworks in order to come up with solutions. While I am interested in getting a publication out of this work, I am unsure of the types of conferences/journals that accept case-study articles (specifically in AI ethics). Any advice from academicians over here would be greatly appreciated! submitted by /u/jwalapoet [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi fellow computer scientists, ​ After reading the paper Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models I got a little confused. Looking at section "2.2. Training in Practice" the authors say that: 1) "The network could also predict the noise eps added to x_0, and this noise could be used to predict x0 via..." ​ 2) "Ho et al. (2020) found that predicting eps worked best..." ​ So this left me wondering if the noise predictor is trying to compute (1) the epsilon that was added to x_0 through the close-form formula or (2) the noise added in the previous timestep to obtain x_t from x_{t-1} (i.e., eps_t or eps_{t-1}, idk...)? ​ Thank you :) submitted by /u/Christs_Elite [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello all, I recently did a summer research project implementing GPT-2 to generate mazes. The core concept of the model is to combine a bunch of popular maze generation algorithms into one. The goal was that the transformer will be able to identify key components using self-attention and piece together different algorithms. Most maze generation algorithms result in almost a finger print (like in chaos theory). The end goal was to mimic a higher degree of randomness / make the mazes appear less algorithmic. I'm dipping my toes into the realm of research and am looking for feedback. So far I've run the model for 5x5 mazes, it would be interesting to try training the model with varying dimensions. Feel free to join in and contribute to the project! https://github.com/noah-hein/mazeGPT 5x5 live generation https://i.redd.it/v6smbdd88gsb1.gif ​ submitted by /u/noah-hein [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am currently working on a binary classification problem where I aim to predict whether a customer will make a purchase in the next 30 days based on their transaction history. I have a dataset of 1,000 transactions with the following features: TransactionAmount (float): The amount of the transaction. ProductCategory (categorical): Category of the product purchased (e.g., Groceries, Electronics, Books). DateOfPurchase (datetime): The date on which the transaction occurred. I've done some preprocessing and feature engineering, including normalization, one-hot encoding of categorical variables, creating interaction terms, and adding features like days since the first purchase and whether the purchase was made during the holiday season.Dataset is balanced and cleaned. I started with a base Random Forest classifier with default parameters as a starting point, but the performance is not satisfactory (accuracy = 48.5%, ROC-AUC = 0.485). I tried other models as well but was unable to improve the accuracy by more than 57%. submitted by /u/SnooTigers4634 [link] [comments]

Making a post for EMNLP 2023 results to come out today. submitted by /u/East-Beginning9987 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

I’ve been given a task to identify if a PCB is faulty or not based on its frequency response. I don’t have labeled data. The data I have are various gain values calculated over frequencies, so my data looks something similar to the table below. PCB | Frequency | G1 | G2 PCB 1 | 1Hz | 0.1 | 1 PCB 1 | 2Hz | 0.2 | 2 PCB2 | 1Hz | 0.3 | 3 PCB2 | 2Hz | 0.4| 4 Each PCB has several G parameters measurements taken over the same set of frequencies. I need to use an auto encoder to identify outliers and I need help in deciding how my feature matrix should look like. For example, let us consider only one data point that is PCB 1, then would a matrix like this make sense? [[ 0.1 0.2 ] - 1st row is all G1 values [1 2]] - 2nd row is all G2 values Similarly the matrix for the other PCBs are also created. I have not included frequency in my feature set because these G parameters have been measured for the same set of frequencies for all PCBs. Is this correct ? Additionally, are there any resources someone can point me to related to finding anomalies in frequency response data ? I am struggling with using the keywords while googling. submitted by /u/Savage_Garbage [link] [comments]

Paper. I am not affiliated with this paper or its authors. Twitter thread (Nitter alternative for those who want to see the entire thread without being logged into Twitter). Related work: Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models. submitted by /u/Wiskkey [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Researchers at Meta trained a deep learning model on brain recordings and audio data from 169 people listening to speech. Their method achieves up to 73% accuracy at identifying a 3-second clip of speech from non-invasive EEG or MEG scans. This is a massive improvement over previous attempts at decoding speech from neural signals. It approaches the performance of studies using implanted electrodes. The key innovations: A contrastive loss function that aligns latent speech and brain representations Leveraging pretrained speech models like wav2vec 2.0 Training one model on multiple subjects with individual tuning Being able to decode speech intention from brainwaves could one day help restore communication for patients suffering from strokes, ALS, etc. There's still a ways to go before this becomes a medical reality. Performance needs to improve and be validated during speech production rather than just passive listening. And the accuracy isn't high enough for natural conversations. But this is a hugely promising step toward brain-computer interfaces. Really interesting work at the intersection of neuroscience and AI! TLDR: New model achieves up to 73% accuracy decoding speech directly from non-invasive brain scans. Could eventually help patients with neurological conditions communicate just by thinking. Full summary here. Paper is here submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Discussion thread for EMNLP 2023 notifications which will be released in a few hours along with GEM workshop. Best of luck to everyone. submitted by /u/EDEN1998 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey all, I am working with stock market data and scratching my head if certain variables are ordinal and can be left as is or if it is nominal and should be one-hot encoded. One of the variables in question consists of the direction of the market over a certain time. It has three categories: up, down, sideways. hope was to code them as 1, -1 and 0 respectively and treat as ordinal. There appears to be some order/relationship between them but not sure if it is enough. Is this the correct approach or should it be one-hot encoded? submitted by /u/Fishpo0 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've been out of the deep learning space for a while now and I'd like to take an online course, or set of courses, to get myself back up to speed on the latest techniques, architectures, and how to use them. I think the DeepLearning.ai specialization through Coursera is a good match, but I see that it uses Tensorflow. Is there any course like this that would use PyTorch? Or would the transition not be too hard once the fundamentals are in place? Thanks! submitted by /u/ComicFoil [link] [comments]

Need some help what is the best way to start. Pls Advice ! I have a specific code in my repos (lets say .net + JS). The goal is to have prompt based code adjustments to existing repos (like very focused copilot) . Either using single agent or using something like AutoGen. So let say I have thousands of files with code and some descriptions about code functionality (spec) . I want either to generate code based on next spec and I want newly generated code to be similar in style to what is in my repos. So now questions: Should I vectorize my code (What is best way to do that ?) or try to fine tune some model ? Give me your ideas / experience in code generation based on previous code. submitted by /u/mcwin1 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I decided to open-source my own web scraping API that I'm using to get information from different websites without using any selectors or XPath. Just provide the URL and a desired JSON schema, and it will return extracted data. Hope this can be helpful for someone. Cheers! https://github.com/semanser/JsonGenius https://preview.redd.it/icq1i8slvesb1.png?width=4096&format=png&auto=webp&s=ac86ccdb3da5ef1ffa86e3473619162f6b652ac6 submitted by /u/semanser [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Can LLMs actually improve their own reasoning by self-correcting mistakes? A new paper from DeepMind and the University of Illinois looks to answer this quantitatively. The results show that unaided, LLMs struggle at self-correction for reasoning tasks. The core issue is LLMs have trouble reliably evaluating the correctness of their own responses. They rarely identify flaws in initial reasoning. Sometimes LLMs even alter initially correct responses to become incorrect after self-correction! (I've personally seen this when interacting with ChatGPT many times and you probably have too). More complex techniques like critiquing between LLM instances don't help much either. External feedback or guidance looks necessary to improve reasoning (Well, some interesting parallels to this paper here about implicit improvement from preference data vs traditional RLHF). Self-correction does show promise for things like making responses more polite or safe though. Criteria there are more clear-cut. The authors argue we need to balance enthusiasm with realistic expectations on self-correction. It has a lot of limits for improving reasoning (at least with current models). But they suggest promising directions like incorporating high-quality external feedback from humans, training data, and tools. That could be key to unlocking self-correction's potential down the road. TLDR: Basically title... LLMs can't reliably self-correct reasoning yet. Maybe hybrid techniques combining self-correction with external guidance could work but we need more research. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Calling all AI researchers! Using data aggregation, harmonization, fusion, and other data enhancement methods, you can help the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) enhance the utility of NIDDK datasets for AI applications. The goal of the NIDDK Data Centric Challenge will be to generate an “AI-ready” dataset that can be used for future data challenges, using data on Type 1 Diabetes available through the NIDDK Central Repository. Register today! https://www.challenge.gov/?challenge=niddk-central-repository-data-centric-challenge submitted by /u/DataCentricChallenge [link] [comments]

in the Meta Llama 2 license agreement (that can be found here), there is a section of "Prohibited Uses" that clearly states several use cases that the signer must accept upon himself, but several of them state the word "facilitate", as far as i can understand, if we use Llama 2 as part of a commercial product, and some end-user will use the product in malicious way (say cause the chat-bot to write the recipe of mustard gas) then this could be considered that the creator of the product is facilitating the end-user, ​ so my questions are: do you think this is a fair interpretation of the agreement ? does that mean the creator is liable to whatever the model spit out ? is there a way to censor the model (short of retraining a new model, or fine-tune on a large scale) ? is there an open source model that already gone through the process, and more safe for commercial use ? ​ https://preview.redd.it/3zo3tm4e8esb1.png?width=1197&format=png&auto=webp&s=8aa522183f82ba8f85edb69cbaabd93262efd516 ​ as per @gentlecucumber advice, i also posted it on r/legaladvice: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/170ll2t/d_is_meta_llama_2_license_agreement_safe_to_sign/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 submitted by /u/Particular_Flower_12 [link] [comments]

Which would be the best OCR toolkit to invest the effort to learning and building a pipeline for an OCR system that will be used to extract Japanese text? I tried Tesseract initially and although I got some good results, I found it hard to do finetuning due to messy and outdated documentation. I haven't had the time to look at the other two OCR tools yet but if anyone had any experience, please do share them especially with how easy or difficult is the finetuning process as well as deploying the tuned models. submitted by /u/Spitfire_ex [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, our company plans for some budget in 2024 to invest into hardware to do the following - running local LLMs for our coworkers to interfere with an locally running offline GPT alike ChatGPT. Use cases: generating templates for email, letters etc Translation (EN/GER/FR/SPA) Querying internal knowledge bases and/or FAQs/HOWTOs I did some research but it is still hard for me to estimate what are the HW / AI skill requirements to implement something not a quarter as good as ChatGPT. Ive played with Nomics gpt4all which comes close to a baseline. We cant use cloud services due to our data privacy policy, so I checked on what would be a good starting point to invest into hardware. I came up with a gamer PC (octacore Intel i9/AMD Ryzen 7) utilizing NVidia RTX 4090 (24Gb) / Radeon RX 7900 / 2TB SSD / 64Gb RAM for approximately 3600 Eur. I am pretty sure that would be sufficient to host a decent LLM serving simultaneous client requests. But is there also a way to adapt / process our companies data? Most sources state that proper LLMs were trained using hundreds of NVidia A100 and thousands of CPUs. On the other hand we would be fine with just fine-tuning a pretrained model. Could you please point me to some sources to learn more about possibilities and requirements as to be able to make well-informed investment decisions? Also, we probably lack the required skills, and would be interested to learn if there are companies and/or projects assisting with this kind of task? thanks submitted by /u/EatTFM [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Is there any good research on which benchmarks LoRAs are most effective at impacting, or are they relegated mostly to changing the style of an LLM's response? submitted by /u/30299578815310 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have a regression model, predicting a popularity of a text. I have its performance metrics on test set, e.g. RMSE and MAE. This gives me an uncertainty estimate about its predictions. Now I want to transform the text in some way, e.g. give it to human experts or another model to "upgrade" (in terms of getting better popularity). So I have the original and transformed text. Now I have 3 popularity scores: true popularity for original text predicted popularity for original text predicted popularity for transformed text Obviously, if model MAE is for example around 5, and predicted popularity for transformed text is higher than for the original by 1.5, this can be totally random, due to errors in the model prediction. How can I measure if text transformation is beneficial, i.e. statistically significantly better than the original text, incorporating information about model quality? Requiring that the improvement has to be higher than model error would be incredibly strict. submitted by /u/qalis [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/wojcech [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02244 Abstract: By classifying infinite-width neural networks and identifying the optimal limit, Tensor Programs IV and V demonstrated a universal way, called μP, for widthwise hyperparameter transfer, i.e., predicting optimal hyperparameters of wide neural networks from narrow ones. Here we investigate the analogous classification for depthwise parametrizations of deep residual networks (resnets). We classify depthwise parametrizations of block multiplier and learning rate by their infinite-width-then-depth limits. In resnets where each block has only one layer, we identify a unique optimal parametrization, called Depth-μP that extends μP and show empirically it admits depthwise hyperparameter transfer. We identify feature diversity as a crucial factor in deep networks, and Depth-μP can be characterized as maximizing both feature learning and feature diversity. Exploiting this, we find that absolute value, among all homogeneous nonlinearities, maximizes feature diversity and indeed empirically leads to significantly better performance. However, if each block is deeper (such as modern transformers), then we find fundamental limitations in all possible infinite-depth limits of such parametrizations, which we illustrate both theoretically and empirically on simple networks as well as Megatron transformer trained on Common Crawl. Interesting, great to see this line of work continued, muP was great, now Depth-muP submitted by /u/_puhsu [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

One of my students asked me: “Which is the best area/s for Gen AI start-ups?” This is not an easy question – mainly due to the dynamic nature of AI, but here are two reference points. The first is a Generative AI Tools Landscape from DataCamp. This gives both the categories and the subcategories for… Read More »Generative AI megatrends: Gen AI start-up ecosystem The post Generative AI megatrends: Gen AI start-up ecosystem appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 19 min )

A campaign using AI voice cloning technology to impersonate Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of Sudan, has gained attention on TikTok. The anonymous account has been posting what it claims are 'leaked recordings' of the ex-president, despite Bashir not being seen in public for a year and being believed to be seriously ill. Experts warn that campaigns like this demonstrate how new tools can quickly and cheaply distribute fake content through social media. The authenticity of the recordings has been questioned, but evidence suggests that voice conversion software has been used to mimic Bashir's voice. TikTok has taken down the account, stating that it violated their guidelines on posting false content and the use of synthetic media. Source : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-66987869 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

I love Bard. It eloquently tells me things in a way that meets and exceeds my expectations, and even more than GPT-4. But what is Google's strategy behind programming it to say things that it knows are not true? Do they train it to say what the user wants to hear? If so, that's disconcerting to say the least, although could be a brilliant way to comb users for enhancement requests. Here is my most recent experience, a humorous example which I feel illustrates the point perfectly: Me: Bard, can you take a .wav audio file and create a phoneme transcript using the IPA symbol library? Bard: Yes, I can work from a .wav audio file to transcribe your speech into IPA phonemes. You can upload the file to a cloud storage service such as Google Drive. Me: Great. Here's the link to the file: <link…

Join us! /r/thisiswhyaiwasmade is where we have fun and celebrate the enjoyable and entertaining side of the tech. Need a place to put your silly and playful prompts, AI generated content, ideas for ways the bend the rules of AI? This is the place! submitted by /u/unknowingafford [link] [comments]

In the context of maximizing positive impact, AI has transformative potential in healthcare. Let's start with personalized medicine. AI can analyze vast data sets, consisting of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle variables, to tailor medical treatments for individuals. This level of personalization could substantially increase treatment effectiveness and reduce adverse side effects. We're not just talking about better pills; we're envisioning targeted gene therapies and custom-tailored interventions that could be more curative rather than merely palliative. Beyond personalization, AI can democratize healthcare access. Remote areas without specialists could have AI systems that diagnose and recommend treatments, making quality healthcare accessible without the need for extensive travel. Telemedicine could be supercharged by AI, offering medical consultations and second opinions to anyone with internet access. Moreover, AI could lead breakthroughs in drug discovery and epidemiology. It could analyze complex biochemical interactions at a speed unattainable by humans, slashing the time and cost to bring new drugs to market. On a larger scale, AI could monitor and model the spread of diseases, providing actionable insights for containment and treatment strategies. So, AI in healthcare is not merely an incremental improvement. It's a paradigm shift that could equalize healthcare access and significantly extend human life while improving its quality. All these advancements could happen within our lifetime, changing the face of medicine and, by extension, society. submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]

Functioning. Humans use the brain's computing power, memory, and ability to think, whereas AI-powered machines rely on data and specific instructions fed into the system. Besides, it takes a very long time for humans to process and understand the problems and gets accustomed to them. submitted by /u/Virtual-Study-Campus [link] [comments]

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submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]

Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of DeepMind and CEO of Inflection AI, discusses his concerns about AI risks and the need for precaution. He believes that while some extreme scenarios may be over the top, it's important to treat powerful technologies with caution. Suleyman highlights the middle layer of AI risks that people often underestimate, which involves the amplification of goals for both good and bad actors. He emphasizes the need to contain AI to prevent potential negative consequences. Suleyman talks about the balance between risks and opportunities in technology and the importance of considering both aspects. He mentions the hype around generative AI and the need to look beyond the surface to understand its true potential. Suleyman discusses the discussions with lawmakers about AI and the challenge of bridging the gap between policy makers and tech experts. Source : https://venturebeat.com/ai/deepmind-cofounder-is-tired-of-knee-jerk-bad-takes-about-ai/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/norcalnatv [link] [comments]

Can LLMs actually improve their own reasoning by self-correcting mistakes? A new paper from DeepMind and the University of Illinois looks to answer this quantitatively. The results show that unaided, LLMs struggle at self-correction for reasoning tasks. The core issue is LLMs have trouble reliably evaluating the correctness of their own responses. They rarely identify flaws in initial reasoning. Sometimes LLMs even alter initially correct responses to become incorrect after self-correction! (I've personally seen this when interacting with ChatGPT many times and you probably have too). More complex techniques like critiquing between LLM instances don't help much either. External feedback or guidance looks necessary to improve reasoning (Well, some interesting parallels to this paper here about implicit improvement from preference data vs traditional RLHF). Self-correction does show promise for things like making responses more polite or safe though. Criteria there are more clear-cut. The authors argue we need to balance enthusiasm with realistic expectations on self-correction. It has a lot of limits for improving reasoning (at least with current models). But they suggest promising directions like incorporating high-quality external feedback from humans, training data, and tools. That could be key to unlocking self-correction's potential down the road. TLDR: Basically title... LLMs can't reliably self-correct reasoning yet. Maybe hybrid techniques combining self-correction with external guidance could work but we need more research. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

Buddy no of the tool where I can take an image have an AI translated and replace the text with the same style and have it in the new language like for example translating a Japanese image to English and have it look exactly the same just in English I'm looking for a free one that doesn't require credits it can be a desktop app or a website doesn't matter just needs to be free submitted by /u/agentduckman12 [link] [comments]

Hey there! I'm a 1-man card game designer and while juggling the project as well as mt senior year of college, I have been relying heavily on AI-generated artwork to speed up my workflow with some illustrations and other forms of world-building. In regards to the recent legal decisions (in the US), in which any work produced by AI cannot be copyrighted, how much do I need to change the illustrations to become my own, if I even can at all? Thanks! Edit for clarity: I am also an illustrator. So this question comes from the perspective of an artist trying to save time and energy for other projects submitted by /u/Luke192 [link] [comments]

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Jamie Dimon says the next generation of employees will work 3.5 days a week and live to 100 years old submitted by /u/AminoOxi [link] [comments]

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In this post, we explain how to build and optimize a custom classification model using Amazon Comprehend. We demonstrate this using an Amazon Comprehend custom classification to build a multi-label custom classification model, and provide guidelines on how to prepare the training dataset and tune the model to meet performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score.  ( 8 min )

Large language models (LLMs) have captured the imagination and attention of developers, scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and executives across several industries. These models can be used for question answering, summarization, translation, and more in applications such as conversational agents for customer support, content creation for marketing, and coding assistants. Recently, Meta released Llama 2 for both […]  ( 7 min )

Amid the race to make AI bigger and better, Lincoln Laboratory is developing ways to reduce power, train efficiently, and make energy use transparent.  ( 11 min )

submitted by /u/nickb [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/nickb [link] [comments]

When I was writing my post on lemniscate functions yesterday, a line from the Wikipedia article seemed familiar for reasons I cannot place. Defining a tangent-sum operator as a ⊕ b := tan(arctan ⁡ a + arctan ⁡ b) gives cl² z ⊕ sl² z = 1. I feel like I’ve seen this tangent-sum used before, but […] Tangent sum first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

We begin with a couple examples. First, the set of linear transformations from one vector space to another is itself a vector space. Second, the set of continuous linear operators from one Banach space to another is itself a Banach space. Or maybe better, this set can be made into a Banach space. In the […] Enriched categories first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

This is the fourth post in a series on generalizations of sine and cosine. The first post looked at defining sine as the inverse of the inverse sine. The reason for this unusual approach is that the inverse sine is given in terms of an arc length and an integral. We can generalize sine by […] p-norm trig functions and “squigonometry” first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

This is the third post in a series on generalizing sine and cosine. The previous post looked at a generalization of the sine and cosine functions that come from replacing a circle with a lemniscate, a curve that looks like a figure eight. This post looks at replacing the circle with a hyperbola. On the […] Geometric derivation of hyperbolic trig functions first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )